Junior Fellow, Michigan Society of Fellows; Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology
he/him/his
jacklv@umich.edu
Sociology;
Faculty;
Sociology of Culture;
Work, Economy, and Organizations;
Politics and Social Change;
Race and Ethnicity;
Gender and Sexuality
Education/Degree:
PhD in Sociology, Columbia University (2026)/MPhil in Sociology
Columbia University (2024)/MSc in Social Science of the Internet
University of Oxford (2018)/BA with Honors, Linguistics
University of Pennsylvania (2016)
About
Jack LaViolette is a sociologist broadly interested in culture, historical sociology, language and linguistics, and computational methodology. At Michigan he is a postdoctoral fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows and an Assistant Professor of Sociology. His dissertation project reconstructs the "folk sociology" of the Gilded Age American literary field—the implicit theory of persons and society that circulated through the first truly mass culture in the United States—using an original dataset digitized from period trade catalogs and linked to full-text sources. Other ongoing work, much of it collaborative, examines topics ranging from the relationship between conversational structure and feelings of closeness with one's interlocutors; the effects of partisan polarization on the spatial and temporal distribution of American flag displays, using an original dataset of street-level images; the gendering of college syllabi reading materials and its effect on gender parity in undergraduate majors; and an original semiotic theory of "AI slop." His research appears in the American Journal of Sociology, PNAS, and leading computational linguistics venues, and has received the Roger V. Gould Prize as well as the ASA's Charles Tilly and Richard A. Peterson awards. He received his PhD from Columbia University in 2026.
