In recent years Lamont has taught undergraduate and graduate courses on culture, inequality, recognition, qualitative methods, and theory. Since 2003, she has co-organized the Culture and Social Analysis Workshop in the Department of Sociology, where faculty, post-doctoral researchers, graduate students and visitors come together to share their work in progress. Since 2005, she has also been the co-organizer of the Study Group on Exclusion and Inclusion at the Center for European Studies.
An active mentor of post-doctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduate students, Lamont advises research on a wide range of topics. She received the 2010 Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award, given by the Harvard Graduate Students Council. She was also one of eight Harvard faculty across all schools to be recognized as "master mentor" by the Office of the Senior Adviser for Faculty Development and Diversity in 2010.
For a list of current and past graduate students and post-docs, click here.
Graduate Courses
Sociology 2236: Cultural Processes in the Production of Inequality
This graduate course will consider recent developments at the intersection of cultural sociology and the sociology of inequality. Topics will include: the role of spatial, social and symbolic boundaries in opportunity hoarding, closure and opportunity hoarding; recognition and stigmatization; moral schemas and inequality; the intersection of racial and class exclusion, meritocracy, and the culture of white privilege; , cultural scripts in the construction of racism and anti-racism; new developments in the study of identity, ethno-racial and class cultures; cognition, cultural repertoires and networks; evaluation and other cultural and social processes; and the conceptualization of context and explanations in cultural sociology.
Sociology 2265: Culture, Inequality, and Recognition
This seminar will focus on selected research areas in cultural sociology and sociology more broadly that may be helpful for developing our understanding of the cultural processes of production of social inequality. Topics will include: microsociology; the production of social and symbolic boundaries; moral schemas; cultural scripts in the construction of stigma and status; new developments in the study of identity, ethno-racial and class cultures; destigmatization, recognition and evaluation; and the conceptualization of contexts and explanations in cultural sociology.
Sociology 2209: Qualitative Social Analysis Seminar
This course covers basic techniques for collecting, interpreting, analyzing, and reporting interview and observational data. Focused on both theory and practice, the course aims to expose students to many different kinds of qualitative research to provide students a vehicle to produce a compelling paper based on qualitative data.
Sociology 2209 is organized with the following four objectives in mind: (1) To give you basic training in qualitative research. This requires exposing you to issues of conceptualization, theory, research design, and strategies for framing questions. (2) To consider the various domains or topical areas in sociology where qualitative work has made major contributions. This includes reflecting on the usage of qualitative methods in interpretive, descriptive, and explanatory research. (3) To examine the ethical responsibilities of qualitative researchers, who have closer contact with fellow human beings than other researchers typically do. (4) To think collectively and critically about the forms of writing (articles, dissertations, books, etc.) and professional presentations that sociologists must master to present qualitative work to their peers and the public.
Sociology 3304: Culture and Social Analysis Workshop
The Harvard Culture and Social Analysis workshop has been meeting since 2003 and is currently (2023-24) being led by Michèle Lamont, Ellis Monk, Rachel Kim, Jane Choi, Catharina O'Donnell, and Charlotte O'Herron. Its purpose is to bring together and facilitate exchange between, faculty, graduate students, and visitors working on a range of topics pertaining to the study of cultural products, forms, and processes.
Undergraduate Courses
Sociology 1157: Qualitative Methods in Sociology
What is a good research question, and how can you go about answering it? How do you go from “I wonder” to creating a research design? How do you find people to interview or observe? What do we do about reflexivity and “bias” in our research? This seminar offers an introductory overview of qualitative research methods in sociology. Through a series of hands-on, applied exercises and practical case-studies, students will learn what qualitative research looks like in the real world. You will receive training in the basic instruments, sampling strategies, data collections, practical dilemmas, and common problems of different methodological approaches. You will learn about the advantages and limitations of interview-based, ethnographic and archival research. You will learn how to use coding programs, such as Nvivo, and how to interpret and present findings for different purposes. Once you complete this cord, you will have developed skills that are likely to be useful in your studies, as well as in your worklife.
Sociology 1190: Culture and Inclusion in a More Unequal America
The United States is facing significant challenges at a time when historically stigmatized groups are making claims for greater social justice. How can we fashion a more inclusive American society in a neoliberal context of growing inequality aggravated by the pandemic? We will explore the current context to understand 1) how people find hope when the future is particularly uncertain; 2) how Gen Zs are dealing with the decline of American dream and engaging in the production of alternative collective myths; 3) how social movements and other agents of change contribute to transforming the cultural landscape; 4) how is the hybrid public sphere evolving as social media are gaining in influence; 5) how class cultures are changing and how elite reproduction persists through cosmopolitanism and omnivorousness. Finally, we will consider the United States in comparative perspective to understand how to better create greater equality, solidarity and justice.
Sociology 24: Introduction to Social Inequality
Social inequality concerns the distribution of resources and the recognition of cultural membership to various groups. Thus, at its core, this course seeks to answer a few simple questions: Who gets what? Who is included and excluded? How and why? We will cover core elements of social position: social class, race/ethnicity, and sex/gender. We will focus on patterns of inequality in the United States and other societies and explore the social processes, structures, narratives, and institutions that influence distribution and recognition. We will also apply key sociological concepts to a wide range of empirical cases drawn from contemporary research on social inequality.
Sociology 97: Tutorial in Sociological Theory
Sociologists are a diverse group but they are all bound by one common goal: a desire to understand how society works. Although sociologists adopt a multitude of approaches to understand the social world, they all ask a similar basic question: How and why are patterns of social organization created, maintained, and changed? In their quest to explain why events in the social world occur and why social forms should exist, sociologists develop theories—attempts to understand those properties of, and processes involved in, creating, maintaining, and changing patterns of social organization.
This course introduces you to the thinkers, ideas, concepts, and concerns that together comprise the fields of classical and contemporary sociological theory. Although it can seem as though there is a great distance between empirical research on contemporary societies and the more abstract claims of classical sociological theorists, no good sociology is atheoretical, and any engagement with the history of the discipline will show that its best empirical studies address, borrow from, build upon, or are otherwise in dialogue with themes first laid out in the texts we will read this semester. Because this is so, learning about theory—and classical theory, in particular—is a means to better understand sociology more generally. The theorists we will be grappling with had radically different conceptions of what sociology is and of the purposes to which it should be put, and thought about the social world in original and influential ways.
Sociology 164: Successful Societies: Markers and Pathways
This course analyzes the markers of societal success and the social conditions that sustain it. We will discuss various indicators ranging from the standard economic measures to the human development index, inequality, resilience to shocks, educational, child development and health measures. We will consider the role of cultural and institutional buffers (how cultural repertoires and myths feed strong collective identities, cultural and institutional resources provide support for coping with stigma, models of citizenship and immigration, and multi-level governance and their impact on welfare and poverty). We will addresses factors that present major challenges, like concentrated urban poverty and the well-being of racialized groups, and some of the solutions attempted. Particular attention will be put on the United States, Canada, France and other advanced industrial societies and to the role of space, institutions, and culture in shaping the conditions for successful societies. Public policy implications will also be discussed.
Sociology 98L: Junior Tutorial on Racism and Anti-racism
The empirical focus of this seminar will be the frameworks through which members of various racial groups understand their experiences with racism and discrimination, and how they respond to such experiences. We will also consider the broader context in which groups experience racial equality and inequality. This requires delving into the sociological literatures on stigma, collective identity, group formation, symbolic boundaries, class cultures, and a range of other topics.
The practical focus of the seminar is to teach you how to conduct qualitative research. This involves learning how to formulate a problem and create a research design, how to collect and analyze data, and how to present results.