Rob Robinson
Robert
V. Robinson is the Class of 1964 Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology. Rob
came to Indiana University in 1979 after completing his graduate work at
Yale University and his undergraduate work at Brown University. Rob has
published articles in the American Sociological Review, the
American Journal of Sociology and Social Forces using comparative
and historical methods to address a broad range of questions in social
stratification, economic history, the sociology of religion, and political
sociology: How does belief in the American Dream shape popular attitudes
toward social justice? Why did factories develop as a form of production in
19th century America? How did families living in Indianapolis in the
late-19th and early-20th centuries make ends meet in the face of economic
hardships? Why is trust in others declining in the United States? How does
the division between the religious traditionalists and modernists affect
cultural and economic beliefs in the United States and Europe? How have the
values that U.S. adults want to see fostered in children changed over the
last two decades? What bolsters Americans’ sense of community? How does
support for Islamic law in Muslim-majority nations affect economic policy
preferences? What are the implications of President George W. Bush’s
democracy doctrine for the Muslim world? Which agendas and strategies do
religiously orthodox movements, such as the Salvation Army in the U.S., the
Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Comunione e Liberazione in Italy, and
the Sephardi Torah Guardians (Shas) in Israel share in common?
Rob enjoys teaching large sections of introductory sociology and small
graduate courses on writing for publication. At Indiana he has been awarded
the Edwin H. Sutherland Award for Excellence in Teaching, the IU Trustees
Teaching Excellence Recognition Award, the Sylvia E. Bowman Award for
Distinguished Teaching (an IU system-wide award), and the Outstanding Mentor
Award of the Sociology Graduate Student Association. He is Co-Director of
the sociology department’s Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) program, which won
the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Contributions to
Teaching Award in 2001 while he was department chair. Rob also served as
Director of the Institute for Social Research (now named for Karl F.
Schuessler) from 1986-1989 and 1994-1997. He was the founding co-editor of
Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, now in its 24th
volume. Rob listens to audio-books and French, Italian and German language
tapes ("Comment dit-on...?") on his daily commute to Bloomington from
Greencastle, where he lives with his wife and frequent writing partner,
DePauw sociologist Nancy Davis, and three cats, Oodle, Smokey, and Sydney.
Rob is known in the department for his choice of idyllic sabbatical locales:
he divided his first sabbatical between Freiburg, Germany and Vienna, his
second between Paris, Venice, and Verona, and his third between Paris and
Sydney. When he's not running or bicycling on the back roads around
Greencastle, Rob enjoys cooking, doing carpentry work for Habitat for
Humanity, and reading mysteries.
