It was a decade later, in 1957, when sociology achieved its current status as an independent department. Important faculty members during this middle period included Charles N. Reynolds and Richard T. The modern era of sociology at Stanford dates from the years 1959-60 when Sanford M. Dornbusch was invited to chair the department and allowed to make a number of faculty appointments to strengthen t
he program. Arriving with Dornbusch in that year were Joseph Berger, Santo F. Camilleri, Bernard P. Cohen, and W. Richard Scott. Dornbusch, Berger, Cohen and Scott remained at Stanford throughout their careers. Arriving only slightly later were Morris Zelditch, Jr. and John W. Later major additions to the department through the decades of the 1970s and 1980s include, Elizabeth G. Cohen, William J. Goode, Michael T. Hannan, Alex Inkeles, Dudley Kirk, Seymour Martin Lipset, James G. March, and Nancy B. Tuma. Appointments during the 1990s included Karen Cook, Mark Granovetter, Doug McAdam, Susan Olzak, Cecilia Ridgeway, C. Matthew Snipp, and Andrew Walder. These hires were followed by the successful recruitment of Monica McDermott, Michael Rosenfeld, and Gi-Wook Shin. In addition to strengthening the areas of academic concentrations described above, these more recent appointments have allowed the department to offer courses and research training in the additional areas of economic sociology, race and ethnicity, network analysis, political sociology, social movements and social stratification. Most recently, in 2004, the department recruited Paula England and David Grusky, and in 2006, Xueguang Zhou. Since 2008 Shelley Correll, Paolo Paigi, Tómas Jiménez, Cristobal Young, Corey Fields, and Aliya Saperstein have joined the faculty. These hires added significant strength in the areas of social network analysis, historical sociology, sociology of the family, social stratification, organizations, race and ethnicity, and research methods. The department’s current strengths are in social psychology, gender, ethnicity, social inequality, economic sociology, research methods, and political and comparative sociology.
