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Dr. Daniel Nehring, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Ph.D. (Sociology), University of Essex, 2008
email: dfnehring@valdosta.edu
Office: 229) 333-5456
University Center: 1166
My research and teaching interests are mainly located in the areas of cultural sociology, globalization, gender and intimate relationships, and qualitative approaches to social research. I recently completed a large research project on the cultural dynamics of intimate relationships among young middle-class people in Mexico City, with funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) and the University of Essex. For this project, I interviewed 43 women and men working in upper middle-level positions in public administration and transnational corporations on their understandings, experiences, and practices of love, family life, couple relationships, and sexuality. In order to contextualize my participants’ accounts, I also analyzed cultural representations of couple relationships in a large sample of self-help texts in books and magazines. This allowed me to obtain insights into the large-scale cultural logics of intimate life in contemporary urban life In Mexico and to explore the ways in which they are embedded in wider, transnational cultural flows. I have published parts of this research in international academic journals in English and Spanish, and I am currently working on a series of future publications. I have also presented different aspects of my findings at international conferences of the British Sociological Association, the Society for Latin American Studies, and the Latin American Studies Association, among others.
I am originally from Germany, but have been living in England and Mexico for the past ten years, before moving to the USA. Prior to coming to Valdosta State University, I worked at the University of Westminster (2007) and the University of Essex (2003-2008), where I also obtained my academic degrees (BA in Sociology (1st class) 2002; MA in Social Research 2003; PhD in Sociology 2007). In 2004/2005, I furthermore was a visiting researcher at El Colegio de México and the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS) in Mexico City. At Essex and Westminster, I gathered extensive teaching experience in sociological theory, cultural sociology, media studies, criminology, qualitative and quantitative research methods, qualitative and quantitative data analysis and statistics, and software packages for social research (e.g. SPSS, MaxQDA, Endnote).