I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Previously, I was an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Ohio State University (2020-2023) and a postdoctoral associate at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University (2019-2020). I earned my PhD in Sociology from Duke University in 2019.
My research focuses on culture & cognition and inequality & stratification. Specifically, I use a cognitive approach to culture in order to understand how people form diverse beliefs and perceptions about important stratifying institutions in society — like discrimination, occupations, social movements, and schools and universities — to show how these beliefs and perceptions in turn shape inequality. My work employs a wide variety of methodological approaches, including survey-experiments, interviews, and analysis of secondary survey and administrative data.
My work has been published in American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Poetics, and Social Problems, among other outlets. Findings from these studies have been covered in U.S. News & World Report, Inside Higher Ed, and The Hechinger Report. This research has been generously supported by the Russell Sage Foundation, the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race & Ethnicity, Ohio State’s Department of Sociology Seed Grant fund, OSU’s Institute for Population Research which includes core support from the National Institutes of Health’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Duke’s Interdisciplinary Institute for Education and Human Development, the Kenan Institute for Ethics, Bass Connections, and the Worldviews Lab.
My most up-to-date CV can be found here.
Lauren Valentino 