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William
Falk
Professor
Ph.D.,
Texas A&M, 1975
Office:
4125 Art-Sociology Building
Phone: 301 405-6396
Email: wfalk@socy.umd.edu
Departmental
Specialty Areas:
Stratification;
Theory
For
my entire professorial career (just over 30 years),
I have been interested in various aspects of life
in the American South, especially the rural South.
Virtually all of my scholarship has focused on
forms of structural inequality, whether analyzing
school desegregation or regional economic development.
This has resulted in journal articles, book chapters,
and books.
 Most
recently, I have extended my heavily quantitative
work with a more qualitative case study approach.
This work is reported in two places: an
edited volume (William W. Falk, Michael D. Schulman
and Ann R. Tickamyer, eds., 2003. Communities
of Work: Rural Restructuring in Local and
Global Contexts. Ohio University Press)
and a monograph (William W. Falk, 2004.
Rooted in Place: Family and Belonging
in a Southern Black Community. Rutgers
University Press). My case study was done
in an historically black southern county.
 Questions
raised there are now being explored in two other
projects. First, with Larry Hunt and Matthew
O. Hunt, we are analyzing return migration to
the South, emphasizing the size, content and meaning
of this migration especially for African Americans
(Falk, Hunt and Hunt, 2004. “Return
Migration of African Americans to the South:
Reclaiming a Land of Promise, Going Home or Both?”
Rural Sociology 69: 490-509;
Hunt, Hunt and
Falk. Forthcoming 2008. “Who is Headed South?
U.S. Migration Trends in Black and White, 1970 –
2000.”
Social Forces).
As a by-product of this project, we also turned
our attention to Hurricane Katrina’s effects
on New Orleans (Falk, Hunt and Hunt, 2006.
“Hurricane Katrina and New Orleanians’
Sense of Place: Return and Reconstitution
or ‘Gone with the Wind’?”
Du Bois Review 3: 115-128).
This stream of migration-related work continues
with grant proposals and journal manuscripts currently
under review.
My second project, extending
issues raised in the qualitative work, focuses
on the rise of gated communities in the Lowcountry
(primarily the South Carolina and Georgia
coastline). These places have been built
mostly in counties that were, not long ago,
majority or heavily black, and in all cases,
economically poor. I have wondered what
the presence of elite, expensive, wealthy,
all-white communities means for both those
living on them and those (the indigenous
residents) living around them? In 2006 –
2007 I lived in the coastal low country visiting
such places and interviewing people about them.
I am now writing toward what I hope will be a
new book about this.
 For
the foreseeable future, I will be teaching
courses at both the graduate and undergraduate
levels. For graduate students, it is likely to
be new course on “Sociological Methodologies.”
This is aimed primarily at first-year students.
It covers some basics on the theory-research
relationship but also offers weekly foci – with
participating faculty – on topics ranging from
survey research to content analysis,
experiments, network analysis, feminist
methodology, qualitative methods, historical and
comparative methods, and related methodological
approaches. For undergraduate students, I will
be teaching 3 courses: two on the American
South (one in the department; one for the
university honors program); my other course will
be the departmental honors research course,
taken by the students in the department’s honors
program which I direct.
Course
Syllabi:
Sociology 701: Issues in
the Integration of Theory and Methods
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