Ronald Neil Jacobs joined the sociology department this fall, bringing with him a strong background in studying the role of the media in public discourse.

Ron Jacobs obtained his Ph.D. in sociology at UCLA in 1996, where he completed a dissertation entitled “Civil Society, Discourse, and Crisis: Race and the Media, From Watts to Rodney King.” Jacobs says of his research, “What I’ve tried to do, rather than think about a single public arena, is to compare how different public arenas cover big events—for example, how African-American and mainstream media cover racial crises.”

Richard Alba, chair of the Sociology Department at the time Jacobs was hired, remarks, “Ron will strengthen our offerings in sociological theory, in qualitative sociology, in cultural sociology, and in mass media; he is at the forefront of several areas that are very hot in sociology today.” Alba points out that Ron Jacobs has worked with “one of the premiere sociological theorists in the United States, Jeffrey Alexander at UCLA.”

Over the summer, Jacobs completed a book entitled Race, Media, and the Crisis of Civil Society: From Watts to Rodney King, to be published by Cambridge University Press. He has also been working on several articles, and has been participating in a yearlong colloquium on media and the public sphere at the New School for Social Research.

Jacobs is currently teaching an undergraduate course in sociological theory and a graduate seminar on “Civil Society and the Public Sphere.”

John LeMay