Department of Sociology

Tom Gieryn retired in 2015 as Rudy Professor of Sociology and Adjunct Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science.  At the time, he also served as Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs and, before that, he served as Department Chair. Tom earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1979, and has been at IU ever since--with visiting professorships at Cornell University, Nankai University (Tianjin, China) and Twente University (Holland), and a year at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. Tom does research on the cultural authority of science and on the significance of place for human behavior and social change. His book Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility On the Line (University of Chicago Press, 1999) won the Robert K. Merton Book Award from the Section on Science, Knowledge and Technology of the American Sociological Association (the prize is named after Tom's mentor at Columbia). Tom’s second book is Truth-Spots:  How Places Make People Believe, also published by the University of Chicago Press, 2018.