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About Us

Prof. Rosenfeld with 2017 BA graduates

Stanford’s Sociology Department has a long and rich tradition of scholarship and teaching

Our scholars specialize in a broad range of research areas - including demography, economic sociology, immigration, and race and ethnicity and with longstanding strengths in sex and gender, social psychology, and stratification.

Faculty and students draw on a variety of methods, including computational methods, experiments, interviews, and statistical modeling. The department is ranked in the top five sociology departments by U.S. News and World Report and top three in the specialty areas of economic sociology, sex and gender, social psychology, and social stratification. 

Our undergraduate major is small and intensive, our coterminal master’s program is one of Stanford’s most popular, and our doctoral program attracts hundreds of applicants from around the world, seeking our advanced, rigorous and highly personalized training. Long known for being at the cutting edge of quantitative methods, we also train students and researchers in qualitative and mixed-methods research.

Sociology faculty are prominent in the university community, serving as directors of:

Institute for Research In the Social Sciences
Clayman Institute for Gender Research
Stanford Center on Poverty & Inequality
Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity
Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center

Our strength is augmented by outstanding affiliated sociologists in the Graduate School of Business, the Graduate School of Education, and Stanford Law School. Our current Department Chair is Professor Michael Rosenfeld. Please explore the pages within this website, and feel free to contact us for further information.