Jeffrey Alexander

Jeff Alexander (Harvard BA 1969, UC-Berkeley Ph.D. 1978) joined Yale’s sociology department in 2001 after 25 years at UCLA, becaming Emeritus in 2024. Pioneering a new field called “cultural sociology,”  Jeff created the Center for Cultural Sociology soon after arriving at Yale (he is now Director Emeritus) and the American Journal for Cultural Sociology in 2010, which he continues to co-edit. Challenging the scientism that (as Jeff sees it) benumbs mainstream sociology, cultural sociology draws from the humanities rather than the hard sciences, translating concepts like narrative, code, symbol, icon, trauma, and performance into vehicles for understanding the dynamics of modern social life. After early metatheoretical work — Theoretical Logic in Sociology (1982-3), Twenty Lectures: Sociological Theory since World War II (1987), Fin-de-Siecle Sociology: Relaitivism, Reduction, and the Problem of Reason (1998) — Jeff’s theorizing became more problem oriented and middle-range: The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology (2003), Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (2004), The Civil Sphere (2006), Remembering the Holocaust: A Debate (2009), The Performance of Politics: Obama’s Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power (2010), Performative Revolution in Egypt: An Essay in Cultural Power (2011), The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered: Democratic Culture, Professional Codes, Digital Future (2016), What Makes a Social Crisis: The Societalization of Social Problems (2019). His most recent work explores the crisis of democracy:  ”Office Obligation as Civil Virtue: The Crisis of American Democracy, November 3, 2020 - January 6, 2021, and After” (2023), Civil Repair (2024) and Frontlash/Backlash (2025). Jeff served as department Chair at both UCLA and Yale, the latter from 2002-2005.