Neal Caren
Professor of Sociology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
I am a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
My research focuses on contemporary US social movements and the uses of media data for understanding movement processes. With Edwin Amenta, I authored Rough Draft of History: A Century of US Social Movements in the News (Princeton 2022), and my work has appeared in journals including American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Social Problems, and the Annual Review of Sociology. I’m also currently editing a collection of W.E.B. Du Bois’s writings published in The Crisis.
I serve as editor of Mobilization, the premier interdisciplinary journal specializing in social movements, protests, and other forms of contentious politics—check out our most recent issue.
At Carolina, I serve as Director of the First Year Seminars and Launch program while teaching introduction to sociology (SOCI 101) and Social and Economic Justice (SOCI 274) At the graduate level, I teach computational social science, focusing on collecting and analyzing text data with Python.
I enjoy the trails in Carolina North Forest and am a midpack finisher in trail races.