Teaching

Office Hours Spring 2024: Limited and ad hoc due to travel and committee obligations

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Location: Social Sciences Research Building 414

Teaching at UChicago

Courses Planned for AY 2024-25

Autumn 2024: Population (Grad)

Winter 2025: Global Society II

Winter 2025: Demographic Techniques (co-taught with Luciana Luz, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais)

AY 2023-24

Autumn 2023: Principles of Sociological Research

Winter 2024: Global Society II

Winter 2024: Logic of Social Inquiry (co-taught with Prof. Marco Garrido)

AY 2022-23

Winter 2023: Data Analysis with Demographic and Health Surveys

Winter 2023: Global Society II

Winter 2023: Making Population: The Unnatural History of Counting and Classifying Humans

UChicago Workshops I Participate In

PRC Demography Workshop Hosted by the Population Research Center at the University of Chicago, this weekly workshop is where demographers gather to exchange ideas about works-in-progress. I expect the UChicago students I advise to attend regularly.

African Studies Workshop A bi-weekly workshop hosted by the Committee on African Studies at the University of Chicago. Possibly the longest-continuously-running workshop on our campus.

For Prospective PhD Students

I advise PhD students working in the areas of fertility and family formation, religion and social change, and sexual and reproductive health, including HIV & AIDS.

Some additional notes for prospective graduate students:

• Information about our program can be found here.
• If you are writing to find out if I might supervise your research, the answer is that I might, but our department does not accept PhD students to work under the supervision of a single faculty member, and individual faculty members don’t make admissions decisions. (We have a committee model). If you apply and are admitted into the program, we can begin a conversation about working together.
• I cannot advise prospective students during the application process or interview them before the application deadline. The sociology department will hold interviews with short-listed candidates after all of the applications have been assessed.

For UChicago Students Requesting Letters of Recommendation

Graduate and undergraduate students often need letters of recommendation to pursue a variety of goals (jobs, fellowships, graduate programs, etc.) If I can strongly recommend you based on prior coursework or interactions through a research assistantship, I will agree to serve as a letter-writer. If I don’t know you well enough to write a strong and honest letter that conveys specific information about your strengths and weaknesses, I will let you know that you’d be better served by asking someone else. Please keep in mind that I get nearly 30 LOR requests each year, and a good letter takes me almost a full day to write, so I cannot respond positively to all requests.

If I agree to provide you with a LOR, here are some things you can do to help me with the letter-writing task. Send:

• Your resume or CV
• Drafts of all the application materials you will submit with your application
• 1-2 pages of bullet points about things you’d like me to cover or speak to. This explanation of “bullet points” is stolen from website of a colleague at Princeton Bullet points are not a draft letter but a summary of points you want in my mind as I write. Please send me an actual document (pdf or word), as this is easier for me to keep track of than an email. Please include:
• A brief statement about who else is writing your letters and what if anything that you are hoping my letter will speak to that your other writers cannot (e.g. I am the only person who has seen your data-wrangling skills and you want me to speak to that.)
• Any application-specific requirements or suggestions about what the letter should contain.
• A short description of you see your research agenda being pitched. (I won’t use this directly, but it is helpful for me to know how you are representing yourself.)

Deadlines:

• Please send your request and the specific deadlines about 2 months in advance, so I can plan for this in my calendar.
• Please send me ALL your materials 2 weeks in advance of the deadline.
• If you don’t have confirmation of sent/received from me or some kind of online system, please send me a gentle reminder 2 days before the rec letter is due.