UMd Sociology

Location

The University of Maryland's Department of Sociology is housed in the Art-Sociology building on the University's main campus at College Park. College Park is located "inside the beltway" in the greater Washington, D.C., area. Besides being the capital, Washington is also the city with the greatest concentration of researchers, library books, data archives, and applied social scientists in the world. Sociologists at Maryland are in close proximity to most major social science funding agencies and they also have easy access to the major repositories of social science data such as the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the National Institutes of Health, the National Center for Health Statistics, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as well as such ancillary agencies as the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the National Agricultural Library. Finally, although we are situated in a large metropolitan area, College Park still provides a university community with its many am

Faculty

As of Fall 2010, the Department of Sociology has 24 full-time faculty members and a number of affiliated faculty. It is ranked 20th among all sociology departments nationally by the U.S. News and World Report's annual rating system. The graduate program is organized into eight specialty areas: Demography (directed by Sonalde Desai); Gender, Work, and Family (Reeve Vanneman); Military Sociology (David Segal); Social Psychology (Melissa Milkie); Theory (George Ritzer); Comparative Sociology (Meyer Kestnbaum); Development (Kurt Finsterbusch); and Stratification Alan Neustadtl). In addition to these programs, the department is closely involved with two research centers: the Center for Research on Military Organization and the Maryland Population Research Center. Collectively, these centers account for over five million dollars in annual research funding. The Department is also affiliated with an interdisciplinary Joint Program on Survey Methods (JPSM), founded by Stanley Presser and his colleagues at the University of Michigan and Westat. This program, which is funded by the Federal Statistical System, provides additional resources to faculty and students interested in survey research.

Interdisciplinary and International Flavor

The sociology department encourages interdisciplinary work. Some of the department's graduate courses are taught in collaboration with other units of the university, such as the Departments of Economics, Government and Politics, and the Schools of Social Work, Public Affairs; and Business. The University of Maryland also seeks to create links to other universities in the United States and elsewhere. Each year faculty from different parts of the world come to spend their sabbaticals in the department. About one fourth of our graduate student body is international. The influx of faculty and students from various parts of the world, as well as our location in the nation's capital, makes for a lively and cosmopolitan atmosphere.