Welcome

Comings and goings

Research focus

Events

Talking about...

Main Page

Comings and goings

Comings…

Andrew McKinnon joins us in January, 2008 from the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Toronto Scarborough, where he is Assistant Professor. He obtained his PhD in Sociology from the University of Toronto in 2006. He teaches and researches in the areas of religion, social theory and cultural sociology. He has published articles in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Critical Sociology and Method and Theory in the Study of Religion.

Richie Nimmo joins us in September, 2007 from the Department of Sociology at the University of Manchester, where he is completing his PhD on animal-human relations, an area of specialist interest in the Department of Sociology at Aberdeen. He has a First Class Honours degree in Sociology from the University of Manchester and was awarded the Baron Boulos Prize for outstanding academic achievement in 2002. His undergraduate dissertation was published by the University of Manchester in its Working Papers series and an article is forthcoming in Historical Materialism.

Marta Trzebiatowska joins us on September, 2007 from the Department of Sociology at Exeter University, where she is completing a PhD on gendered narratives of embodiment amongst Polish nuns. She teaches and researches in the area of the sociology of religion, gender and religion, and the sociology of the body. She has a First Class Honours degree in Sociology from Exeter University and was awarded the Barry Turner Memorial Prize for the best academic performance in 2002. Her work on Polish nuns has appeared as chapters in two edited collections.

Goings…

Professor John Brewer to a one year Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship, 2007-2008, to complete work for his book on the sociology of peace processes.

Professor Steve Bruce to a two-year Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship, 2007-2009, to undertake work on religion in Britain in the last fifty years.

Dr. Richard Giulianotti

Sociology deeply regrets the departure of Richard Giulianotti, who recently left the department to take a chair in Sociology at Durham University.

I first encountered Richard Giulianotti soon after I arrived in Aberdeen in the late summer of 1999. At first I could barely penetrate his Italian-Scottish accent, but quickly learned the trick (I hoped). Our first common interest was in football, a focus which rather quickly crystallized into a broader concern with the sociology of sport. I had very rarely engaged intellectually with football – let alone, sport in general – in spite of my wanderings into many corners of the sociological enterprise. Thus, from my point of view a way of fusing these two sets of interests was most welcome and we went on to work closely together. In addition, Richard quickly became interested in the general field of globalization and helped me a great deal in the early days of the development of the Centre for the Study of Globalization. In fact his work for the latter greatly enhanced our mutual interest in sport and globalization. More specifically, we embarked upon the writing of a series of papers on football and glocalization, a recent outcome of this being the joint editing of a special issue of the journal, Global Networks – about to be published as a Blackwell book. Another result of our collaboration is the soon-to-be-completed book on the sociology of football (Sage).

Richard was a student at the University of Aberdeen, both as an undergraduate and a postgraduate. He subsequently served as a Research Assistant and a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Sociology and became a full-time Lecturer in 1996. He moved up the academic ladder, obtaining a Readership in 2006 and, then, a Professorship at the University of Durham in 2007. While in our department Richard established a global reputation in the sociology of sport (football in particular) and his “internationalism” was a great attraction for me. He travelled, for academic purposes, widely and his reputation was high in countries across much of the world. For most of his career he has attempted to situate his work on sport at the centre of the discipline as a whole. His contributions to the department were considerable and he was a popular and effective teacher. In addition, he obtained three ESRC grants at a time when external funding was relatively small.

Professor Roland Robertson
Department of Sociology

Dr. Karen O’Reilly

Sociology has lost one of its bright lights and dear friends with the leaving of Karen O’Reilly, who took the position of Reader at Loughborough University in April 2007.

Karen O’Reilly was one of the reasons for my joining the Department of Sociology at Aberdeen in 2004 and she has now left to move to Loughborough! It is as well I love Aberdeen. I first came across Karen when listening to Radio 4’s Today programme, when she was being interviewed about her ethnography of British migrants in Spain – I realised that some ethnographers have more sense than I, as I ruefully reflected on my time spent in the back of police Landrovers high speeding through difficult areas and difficult times when doing my ethnography of the old Royal Ulster Constabulary.

I never did get to meet Karen when I was the Department’s External Examiner since by this time she had gone part time to spend half the year in Spain with Trevor her husband, a builder of repute, so he says; half salary but three-quarters time later persuaded her to come back full time. We would swap photo attachments of our pools – hers an azure blue fit for swimming the Olympics (well, with a huge stretch of the imagination), mine a fish pond with Koi carp, with broken ice as cover. She got the joke and happily came back to join us full time. Her promotion to Reader was all the more an achievement since she had been working half time (although she said three-quarters time) for the latter part of her career. It was very well deserved, but sadly, not enough to keep her. The lure of Southern England beat that of Scottish lochs, verdant hills and rolling seas; Leicestershire’s flat landscape and pylons clearly a happy exchange – but Aberdeen’s bitter winters, sea fogs and North Sea blasts played their part, as did the first grandchild. I know we’ll all miss her – and Trevor – greatly, wishing her well amidst the pylons, as we stare southwards through yet more sea fog.

What made Karen such a special colleague was her collegiality. Read her books on ethnography and you will glimpse her expertise in that field and become aware of her knowledge of sociology, but Karen the person was kind, helpful, conscientious and uncomplaining. Eager to help, never reluctant to volunteer, she was a boon to any departmental head – and nice with it too. She was popular amongst students and colleagues and particularly helpful to new postgraduates. To get all this, along with excellent scholarship and research was remarkable indeed. As a friend from another Scottish university remarked, we were lucky to keep her as long as we did. Loughborough has gained a gem.

Prof. John Brewer
Head of Department, Sociology