Meet the Faculty

Brian Steensland

  • Associate Professor , Department of Sociology
  • Adjunct Professor, Departmen of Religious Studies

Education

  • Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2002

Contact Information

bsteens@indiana.edu
Ballantine 744
(812) 856-0447  

Background

  • Best Article Award, Sociology of Religion section, ASA, 2001
  • Trustees Teaching Award from Indiana University, 2006
  • Edwin H. Sutherland Excellence in Teaching Award from the Department of Sociology in, 2007
  • Best Article Award, Sociology of Culture section, American Sociological Association (ASA), 2007
  • Honorable Mention, Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award, Political Sociology section, ASA, 2007

My research interests include politics, religion, culture, and inequality in American society. My current research projects focus on religious views of the economy and free markets in mid-twentieth-century America, contemporary faith-based anti-poverty efforts, and political contention over morality and values. My book The Failed Welfare Revolution examines the rise and fall of guaranteed income policies as a strategy to reform the American welfare system in the 1960s and 1970s. Based on original research in presidential archives as well as quantitative analyses of media coverage, it highlights the role that cultural factors played in shaping anti-poverty policy.

Research Interests

  • Social Theory
  • Social Policy
  • Religion and Society
  • Cultural Analysis

Courses Recently Taught

  • Religion and Society
  • Moral Controversy in the U.S.
  • Social Theory
  • Political Culture

BOOKS

The Failed Welfare Revolution: America's Struggle over Guaranteed Income Policy. (Princeton University Press, 2008)

Selected Articles and Book Chapters

"Why Do Policy Frames Change? Actor-Idea Coevolution in Debates over Welfare Reform." Social Forces 86:1027-1054, 2008.

"Cultural Categories and the American Welfare State: The Case of Guaranteed Income Policy." American Journal of Sociology 111:1273-1326, 2006.

The Hydra and the Swords: Social Welfare and Mainline Advocacy, 1964-2000." Pp. 213-36 in The Quiet Hand of God: Faith-based Activism and the Public Role of Mainline Protestantism, edited by Robert Wuthnow and John H. Evans. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. 2002

"The Measure of American Religion: Toward Improving the State of the Art." Social Forces 79:291-318. 2000. (Lead author, with Jerry Z. Park, Mark D. Regnerus, Lynn D. Robinson, W. Bradford Wilcox, and Robert D. Woodberry)