News & Events

Welcome to our three new Sociology Assistant Professors!

UNCG Sociology is proud to welcome three new Assistant Professors to the department:  Drs. Trevor Hoppe (Ph.D. Michigan), Sahan Karatasli (Ph.D. Johns Hopkins), and Zachary Levenson (Ph.D. Berkeley).

Dr. Trevor Hoppe comes to UNCG Sociology from SUNY Albany, where he was assistant professor of sociology from 2015-2018. Broadly speaking, his research examines how institutions of medicine, public health, and the law control sex and sexuality. He is the co-editor of The War on Sex (with David Halperin, Duke University Press 2017) and the author of Punishing Disease: HIV and the Criminalization of Sickness (University of California Press 2018). He recently received funding to begin his next project, which will examine the rise of sexually violent predator (SVP) laws that allow states to detain sex offenders beyond their court-ordered sentence under the guise of treatment (rather than punishment, which would be unconstitutional). He earned his PhD in Sociology and Women’s Studies and a Masters in Public Health from The University of Michigan. Hoppe is a native of Charlotte and went to UNC-Chapel Hill for his undergraduate degree, where he was the first student to minor in their newly-offered sexuality studies program.

Dr. Sahan Savas Karatasli was born in Ankara, Turkey.  He received his undergraduate degree in International Relations and Sociology at Koc University in Istanbul; and his M.A and Ph.D in the Department of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University.  After receiving his Ph.D. in 2013, he worked as a post-doctoral researcher at  Princeton University and Johns Hopkins University.  He played a key role in the launching of the Arrighi Center for Global Studies at Johns Hopkins University.  His research examines dynamics of capitalism, social movements and nationalism from a global and long-historical perspective.  His PhD dissertation titled “Financial Expansions, Hegemonic Transitions and Nationalism” was awarded the 2014 Theda Skocpol Dissertation Award by the Comparative and Historical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association.  Just this year he received the 2018 Distinguished Article Award by the Political Economy of World-Systems Section of the ASA.  He likes to teach a wide spectrum of courses ranging from quantitative methods to social theory, from historical sociology to global sociology.  He is currently working on his book manuscript titled “Global Waves of Nationalism: Capitalism, Crisis and Nationalist Movements in the Long Duree”.

Dr. Zachary Levenson began studying sociology as an undergraduate, earning a B.A. from Columbia University. Before he began his graduate studies, he worked as a statistician in an atomic bomb survivor clinic in Hiroshima. He then returned to the US and earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. It was during this period that he began studying urban inequality in South African cities. More broadly, he’s interested in how postcolonial governments manage the growth of shacks during periods of decolonization. He began this work in Southeast Asia before turning to post-apartheid Cape Town, where he conducted a multi-year ethnography of land occupations facing eviction. In addition to government policy, he studies how residents struggle for the right to stay put. Zach’s work combines approaches from political sociology, urban studies, and human geography. His most recent publications have appeared in Urban Studies, International Sociology, Contexts, the British Journal of Sociology, and Catalyst. He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Delivery and Dispossession: The Politics of Housing in South Africa.

New Sociology faculty members with Dean John Kiss and Department Head David Kauzlarich