Kristen Schilt
Sociology; Director of Undergraduate and Graduate Studies for CSGS
Kristen Schilt's research interests center on sociology of gender and sexualities, the sociology of culture, and the sociology of work and occupations. A central focus of her work is finding new ways to make visible the taken-for-granted cultural assumptions about gender and sexuality that serve to naturalize and reproduce social inequality. In 2010, she published the monograph, Just One of the Guys? Transgender Men and the Persistence of Gender Inequality (University of Chicago Press). In this book, she illustrates how the workplace experiences of transgender men can help to illuminate the organizational and interactional processes that contribute to the persistence of gender, race, and sexuality-based inequalities in the workplace.
Schilt's current research is centered on three major areas: longitudinal research on the ways in which gender and race shape the graduate experience, developing a set of survey questions designed to collect attitudinal data about transgender people, and a comparative ethnographic study on major life transformations. Her work has received funding from the National Science Foundation and the American Sociological Association. Professor Schilt is currently the Book Review Editor of The American Journal of Sociology and is on the board of Law & Social Inquiry.