Welcome to the fall semester 2007. We are getting ready to start the new academic year. Many of our faculty members have just returned from the American Sociological Association meetings in New York where they presented a number of papers. The composition of our faculty continues to change. Stephanie Kent and Ana Prokos have accepted jobs at other universities. We shall miss them and we wish them well. Two members of our department are currently in administration: Ron Smith continues to be interim Vice President for Research and Graduate Dean and Kate Hausbeck is Senior Associate Graduate Dean. Matt Wray is in his last year in a post-doctoral position at Harvard University and we await him back next year. Futrell will be on sabbatical for the fall semester and Gottschalk for the whole year.

There are a number of new faces around the department. Christie Batson as joined us from Ohio State as a tenure-track assistant professor; she has research interests, among many areas, in social demography, and in immigration. We also have three new visiting assistant professors: Scott Renshaw fro A.S.U., Sam Park from Pittsburgh University and Nahide Konak from Northeastern University.

Our faculty continues to be highly productive. This past year Fontana and Prokos published a monograph, The Interview: From Formal to Postmodern. The rest of the faculty is currently working on six books, four of which are under contract: Brents, Hausbeck and Crystal Jackson are writing a manuscript on the sex industry for Routledge, Fontana and Keene are working on a text on death and dying for Polity Press, Futrell is doing a monograph for Rowman and Littlefield Publishers on white power, and Ron Smith is exploring the relation between sociology and architecture in a monograph for Princeton Architectural Press. Two other faculty members are doing research on books not yet under contract: Preston is working on the social history of the oldest brothel in Nevada and Gottschalk is arguing that contemporary sociocultural trends promote infantile dispositions in the adult population. Dickens and Shalin have published theoretical articles in excellent journals. Bernhard, among his many endeavors, is directing a grant on gaming addiction in partnership with the School of Medicine of Harvard University.

Jennifer Keene has been promoted to associate professor and is now tenured.

This past year Lisa Sarmicanic completed her Ph.D. and a number of students completed their professional paper for the M.A.

The department will be on the job market again advertising for three positions, with primary emphasis on the areas of crime/deviance, methods/statistics and urban sociology.

If you have any questions about our department, our classes or anything else, please do not hesitate to contact me, our new Graduate Coordinator, Barbara Brents, our new Undergraduate Coordinator, Jennifer Keene, or our Administrative Assistants, Elizabeth Kahre and Catherine Moorhead. We will do our best to assist you. We wish you a very happy year.

—Andrea Fontana