Ph.D.s on the Job Market
Ruby Bafu
Date PhD Received: Spring 2025
Interest Areas: Race; gender; education; children and youth; online learning; social inequality; and qualitative methods
Advisor: Monica Grant
Dissertation Title: “Student-Teacher Interactions in the Context of Alternative Education”
Rebecca Bier
Date Ph.D. Expected: Spring 2027
Interest Areas: Sociology of education, social stratification, early childhood education and care, and quantitative methods
Advisor: Eric Grodsky
Dissertation Title: “Disparities in access and enrollment in preschool in the United States: Impacts on children, mothers, and teachers”
Elia Boschetti
Date Ph.D. Expected: Spring 2027
Interest Areas: Social Stratification, Gender and Sexuality, Health and Aging, Demography and the Life Course, Education, Quantitative Methods
Advisor: Christine Schwartz
Dissertation Title: “A Life-Course Framework for Analyzing Socioeconomic Inequality by Gender and Sexual Orientation ”
Griffin Bur
Date Ph.D. Expected: Spring 2027
Interest Areas: Economic sociology, inequality, methods, stratification
Advisor: Christine Schwartz
Dissertation Title: “Measuring Income, Measuring Inequality: The Critical Role of Capital in US Income Inequality”
Madeline Brighouse Glueck
Date Ph.D. Expected: Spring 2027
Interest Areas: Stratification, Education, Gender
Advisor: Eric Grodsky
Dissertation title: “A Tale of Two Trends: The Rise of Graduate Degrees and Women“
Sadie Dempsey
Date Ph.D. Received: Spring 2025
Interest Areas: Political Sociology, Democracy, Social Movements, Social Inequality, Civil Society, Political Communication, Ethnography and Qualitative Methods
Advisor: Mustafa Emirbayer
Dissertation Title: “Expanding Democracy: An Ethnography of Engaged Citizenship in Wisconsin”
Alexis M. Dennis
Date Ph.D. Expected: Spring 2027
Interest Areas: Higher Education & Graduate Communities; Poverty & Social Mobility; Life Histories and Narrative Analysis
Advisor: Pamela Oliver
Dissertation Title: “Straddling Fences: Elite Academia, Graduate Education, and the Pursuit of Community”
Nona Maria Gronert
Date Ph.D. Received: Fall 2025
Interest Areas: Gender, Law & Society, Social Movements, and Sexual Violence
Advisors: Myra Marx Ferree and Chaeyoon Lim
Dissertation Title: “The Promise and Peril of Title IX Addressing Sexual Violence: A University Case Study, 1972–2017”
Jungmyung Kim
Date Ph.D. Received: Spring 2026
Interest Areas: Organizations, Work and Occupations, Cultural Sociology, Social Inequality, Criminal Justice, Methods
Advisor: Robert Freeland
Dissertation Title: “Police Resistance to Institutional Changes through Complexity: A Study of Occupational Identity Maintenance”
Anna Milewski
Date Ph.D. Expected: Spring 2027
Interest Areas: Political Sociology, Social Movements, Sociology of Religion, Race and Ethnicity, Quantitative and Mixed Methods
Advisors: Ivan Ermakoff, Chaeyoon Lim
Dissertation Title: “Religion as a Social Movement Resource in the Transition to the 21st Century”
Soyun Park
Date Ph.D. Expected: Spring 2027
Interest Areas: Organizations and Occupations; Gender, Work and Family; Experimental Methods
Advisor: Robert Freeland
Dissertation Title: “Navigating Family Leave Usage in the Workplace”
Loren Peabody
Date Ph.D. Expected: Spring 2027
Interest Areas: Communities and Urban Sociology; Political Sociology; Poverty; Class Analysis and Historical Change; Sociology of Economic Change and Development; Environmental Sociology
Advisor: Ivan Ermakoff
Dissertation Title: “The Politics of Public Participation in Land Use Governance in Chicago”
Yue Qin
Date PhD Expected: Spring 2027
Interest areas: Aging and the life course, Health inequality, Family, Work, Social stratification, and Social mobility
Advisors: Michal Engelman and Felix Elwert
Dissertation title: “Educational Advantage and Cognitive Health: Life-Course Mechanisms Across School, Work, and Family”
Peter Ramand
Date Ph.D. Received: Summer 2026
Interest Areas: Class analysis; Political sociology; Quantitative and qualitative methods.
Advisor: Ivan Ermakoff
Dissertation title: “The British Class Matrix”
Kristina M. Fullerton Rico
Date Ph.D. Received: August 2024
Interest Areas: Migration, Latine Studies, Race and Ethnicity, Indigeneity, Gender, Family, Qualitative Methods
Advisor: Jenna Nobles
Dissertation title: “Transnational Undocumented Aging: Challenges Faced by Mexico–U.S. Migrants In Later Life”
Sarah Salas
Date PhD Expected: Spring 2027
Interest areas: Health Disparities, Stress, and Aging
Advisors: Michal Engelman
Dissertation title: “Place and Perceptions: How Stress, Place, and Migration Shape Health and Aging”
Danielle Schmidt-Larios
Date Ph.D. Expected: Spring 2027
Interest Areas: Rural Sociology; Environmental Sociology; Community Development; Mixed-methods
Advisor: Katherine Curtis
Dissertation Title: “The transition of production agricultural land to conservation reserves across two cases”
Avery Warner
Date Ph.D. Expected: Spring 2027
Interest Areas: Crime, Deviance, and Social Control; Social Stratification; Immigration; Gender
Advisor: Michael Light
Dissertation Title: “Criminal Justice Contact, Labor Markets, and Economic Mobility”
To be placed on the “Ph.D.s on the Job Market” webpage of the Department of Sociology website, e-mail soc_communications@ssc.wisc.edu with the following information and materials:
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2. Pronouns (optional)
3. Date Ph.D. expected
4. Interest Areas
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6. Dissertation title
7. Curriculum vitae (pdf)
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10. Email address