Stone Program Postdoctoral Fellows Receive Dissertation Awards

Stone Program Postdoctoral Fellow Luis Flores is the recipient of the 2024 Dissertation Award from the American Sociological Association. The award recognizes the best dissertation in the discipline among those nominated by advisers and department chairs.  Luis’ dissertation, "The Regulatory Politics of Home-Based Moneymaking after the American Family Wage," interrogates the emergence, conflict, and contested incorporation surrounding informal income-generation strategies among American households since the 1970s. These strategies challenged a host of regulations—in labor, land-use, tax, code enforcement, mortgage law—that previously sharply separated home from marketplace. His research traces the recent history of home-based manufacturing, the rental of “granny flats,” child labor, home equity extraction instruments, cottage food laws, home-based child care, and “multi-tier marketing” schemes. During his postdoctoral fellowship with the Stone Program, Luis is writing a book manuscript based on this dissertation. Previous recipients of the ASA Dissertation Award include Stone Program faculty affiliates Jason Beckfield, Christina Cross, Elizabeth McKenna, and Christopher Muller.

Stone Program Postdoctoral Fellow Shay O'Brien is the co-winner of the 2024 Theda Skocpol Dissertation Award. The Comparative and Historical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association awards the Theda Skocpol Dissertation Award annually to the best doctoral dissertation in the area of comparative-historical sociology. Shay's dissertation, "Dallas: Kinship, Mobility, and Inheritance in an Elite Population, 1895-1945," argues that analytically distinct collections of elites are often connected through kin in sprawling upper-class family networks.

Please join us in congratulating Luis and Shay.