University of texas sociology
Welcome to graduate program of the Department of Sociology at The University of Texas at Austin!
The Sociology Department at UT Austin is one of the largest and most highly ranked Sociology departments in the country. Its faculty and students come from every part of the United States and the world, including the Republic of Korea, Taiwan, the People's Republic of China, Mexico, Chile, Turkey, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and others. Its outstanding group of 37 tenured or tenure-track faculty offers an excellent range of opportunities - both inside and outside the classroom - for students. The 2017 US News and World Report Guide to Graduate Departments ranked UT Austin Sociology 6th among public universities, and tied for 11th among all universities. This high esteem, along with the high quality of life in the Austin metropolitan area, makes it easy to see why the Department has become an extremely attractive place for some of the leading young sociologists and graduate students to make UT Austin their home.
Research and Teaching
The Sociology Department at UT Austin offers an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Sociology. It places tremendous value on core training in sociological theory, methods, and statistics at the graduate level. It builds on that core with a variety of course offerings in areas such as criminology and deviance, demography, education, family, gender, health, politics and development, race and ethnicity, and social stratification.
The Department's faculty members are extremely research-active, placing great value on not only disseminating social scientific knowledge but also producing such knowledge - typically working alongside students. Faculty and students regularly publish articles in the leading general and specialty journals of the discipline, and books in leading scholarly presses; many also have their work funded by grants from the federal government and private foundations. Faculty and students regularly present at conferences throughout the country and in international settings, and are actively sought out by policymakers for advice and by the press for the public's better understanding of social trends and issues. While faculty provide strong academic instruction in the classroom, they work very closely with students in the research arena, with many co-authored publications and presentations resulting from faculty-student collaborations in outlets such as the American Sociological Review, Demography, Social Forces, and the Latin American Research Review, and in conferences at the American Sociological Association, the Population Association of America, and many others.
The Department's faculty have won numerous awards, including the Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award, the SWS Distinguished Feminist Lecturership, the American Society of Criminology Fellowship, the Warren E. Miller Award, the Liberal Arts Pro Bene Meritis Award, PAA and SSHD Early Career Achievement Awards, ASA Distinguished Scholarly Book Awards, the Tech Innovation Special Achievement Award, and many more. In addition, the Department has hosted editorships to many internationally renowned journals, including Qualitative Sociology, Gender & Society, the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, and the Journal of Marriage and Family. The Sociology Department and the Population Research Center also house the Urban Ethnography Lab, which aims to forge strong ties between the fields of demography and ethnography. The faculty and current research sections on this website provide a more in-depth look at the areas of specialization and research activity of a productive and diverse group of scholars.
