About the Department
The Department of Sociology continues to strengthen its reputation as a center for research and a home to outstanding academic programs.
In the past few years, our faculty and students have won grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Lilly Endowment Inc., the German Marshall Fund, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, the Social Science Research Council, the John Templeton Foundation, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The Department ranks ranks fifth nationally in the number of articles current faculty have placed in the field's top three journals—the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, and Social Forces—over the three-year period ending in early Fall 2006.
We are proud that success in research has been accompanied by success in the classroom. Undergraduates benefit from faculty mentoring as they complete our honors program, pursue independent research, and learn from internships. Many contribute to Sociological Voices, our undergraduate research journal.
Surveys by both the National Research Council and U.S. News and World Report rate us as having one of the country's most improved graduate programs. Our graduate students, guided by our emphasis on developing scholar-teachers, have been offered more than a dozen College of Arts and Letters Teaching Fellowships and have won four of the top University-wide awards for Excellence in Teaching.
Flagship centers and institutes develop the department's signature strengths, making Notre Dame a leader in the sociology of education, the sociology of marriage and the family, Political sociology and social movements, and the sociology of religion.