In the Fall 2024 semester, WashU's Department of Sociology welcomed three new faculty members. Learn more about each in the feature below!
Earlier this fall, Washington University's Department of Sociology welcomed three new Assistant Professors of Sociology: Darwin Baluran, Yannick Coenders, and Samuel Kye. All three have research interests related to the social construction and institution of race - and their impacts on society.
Assistant Professor Darwin Baluran is also a Faculty Scholar with the Institute of Public Health, earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from Vanderbilt University. His research interests and scholarly publications address how racial inequality is exhibited in society, such as in health outcomes and criminal legal contact, as well as in police interactions.
Next semester, he is teaching SOC 2520: Inequality By Design: Understanding Racial/Ethnic Health Disparities, a newly revived class in the Sociology department. The class exposes students to the health disparities that exist in the US medical system, and then challenges students to develop policy approaches to reduce these disparities. As the course has no prerequisite requirements, it is a great introduction to the field of sociology - particularly for students who are interested in medicine and public health.
Assistant Professor Yannick Coenders earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University, and has also earned degrees in Social Sciences and Human Geography from the University of Amsterdam. His recent research and scholarship queries how race continues to order society, despite the dissolution of the institutions that brought it into being like European colonialism, and slavery. He is currently working on a project entitled Dispersal which studies how elites have shifted from advocating for policies of racial concentration to policies of racial dispersal within cities.
Next semester, he is teaching SOC 3001: Social Theory, a course that examines major theoretical frameworks employed by sociologists to understand power and difference in society. This class is one option students have to fulfill the Theory component required of WashU Sociology majors and minors.
Assistant Professor Samuel Kye earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from Indiana University, and was formerly an Assistant Professor at Baylor University. His current research interests and academic publications investigate residential segregation and the mechanisms that either facilitate or prevent the creation of racially diverse neighborhoods. He is particularly interested in the rise of Asian American “ethnoburb” communities.
Next semester, he is teaching SOC 424: Social Stratification, a new upper-level elective that studies the complex processes that generate inequalities of power, privilege, and prestige in human societies. By employing theoretical and comparative approaches, the class will examine how inequality shapes the lives of individuals in society, how and why inequality persists, and how people have worked to both challenge and reproduce their places in society.
Welcome, new Sociology faculty!
