Andrea Fontana

Department Chairperson
Professor of Sociology
B.A., M.A., Ph.D., University of California, San Diego
Areas of interest:Qualitative Research, Social Psychology, Medicine, Symbolic Interaction.

Andrea Fontana is Professor of Sociology and department chair at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego. He has published articles on aging, leisure, theory, and postmodernism. He is the author of the Last Frontier: the Social Meaning of Growing Old, co-author of Social Problems and Sociologies of Everyday Life, and coeditor of The Existential Self in Society and Postmodernism and Social Inquiry, which has been translated into Chinese and Korean. He is a former president of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction and a former editor of the journal Symbolic Interaction. Among Fontanas last published essays are a deconstruction of the work of the painter Hieronymus Bosch, a performance/play about Farinelli, the castrato, an ethnographic narrative about land speed records at the Bonneville Salt Flats, and a performance based on "Six Feet Under." Fontana is completing Interviewing from Formal to Postmodern, a monograph with Ana Prokos on interviewing with Left Coast Press and working on a text on death and dying for Polity Press. In Fall of 2006, he presented a seminar on qualitative research and symbolic interactionism at the University of Catania and the University of Rome.

Joined faculty in 1976.