Congratulations 2021 Graduates!

While we cannot celebrate with our 2021 graduates in person, Sociology faculty and staff want to congratulate all of our BA, MA, and PhD graduates. We are so proud of you!

We are pleased to announce the following winners of our 2021 Department of Sociology Undergraduate Awards:

Dean’s Recognition Award. Each year the Dean’s office awards an "Outstanding Senior" award in each department. The selection criteria are: demonstrated academic excellence exemplified by an exceptional grade point average, election to honor societies, participation in research, as well as other academic achievements departments may wish to consider. This year, Mia Forney is the winner of the Dean’s Recognition Award.

Lucia Maria Houpt Award. The Lucia Maria Houpt prize is awarded to a graduating senior exhibiting excellence in sociology. Joy Kern is our winner this year.

Nathaniel Cantor Scholarship. The Nathaniel Cantor Scholarship is for sociology students who plan to enter the fields of social work or vocational rehabilitation. The scholarship this year goes to Mia Forney.

Best Undergraduate Student Paper Award. Each year we invite majors and minors to submit term papers or sociological research projects written within the current academic year for consideration for the Best Undergraduate Student Paper Award. Papers were judged based on their incorporation of a sociological perspective, originality, clarity of presentation, and readability. We had many excellent submissions and have selected a first and second place winner.

Our first place winner is Mia Forney for her paper, “The Effect of Offender Race/Ethnic Status on Public Determination of ‘Appropriate’ Sentencing.” In this honors thesis, Mia investigates how the relationship between individuals’ sense of justice and federal sentencing guidelines is moderated by an offender’s race and ethnicity.

Our second place winner is Irena Cao’s, “Analyzing the Etiology of Juvenile Delinquency.” In this paper, Irena investigates how well criminological theories account for two cases of juvenile offending using interview data.

Adeline Gordon Levine Excellence in Teaching Award. Srushti Upadhyay is the recipient of the 2021 Adeline Gordon Levine Excellence in Teaching Award. We evaluated many impressive, high-quality applications for the teaching award this year. It is a testament to the quality of Srushti’s teaching portfolio and the influence she has had on students that she was able to stand out among such a talented pool of instructors.

Nathalie Devine Howe Award for Outstanding Scholarship. Sara DiPasquale is the winner of the 2021 Nathalie Devine Howe Award for her manuscript, "Sociology Faculty Perceptions on Inclusive Language Use." In this paper, Sara offers a timely analysis of original qualitative and quantitative survey data to analyze barriers and openness to gender-inclusive language use among sociology faculty. Her quantitative findings show clear variation by social location in openness to inclusive language, while her qualitative data demonstrate complexity and nuance in barriers that some faculty face to creating more inclusive classrooms. 

Anupriya Pandey won second prize for "Reframing Emergent Dalit Activism: Against the Teleology of Political Success," a paper that demonstrates how notions of caste in India are contested. Her approach to understanding resistance and social change in an international context also has important implications for examining other forms of resistance.  

Third place goes to Kristen Connolly for "Doctors and Professional Sanctions for Opioid Prescription Abuse: Perceptions vs. Reality," a paper that makes use of interview data with a hard-to-reach population to show how the threat of sanctions does or does not interfere with how doctors treat patients.