PhD Date: May 2026 (Expected)
Dissertation Title: Imagining Inclusion: How Muslim Advocates Craft Public Images in U.S. Civic Life
Areas of Research/Teaching: Culture; Political Sociology; Sociology of Religion; Civic Inclusion; Qualitative Methods; Ethnography; American Muslims; Islam; Advocacy; Race and Ethnicity; Social Theory; Pragmatism
Dissertation Committee: Paul Lichterman (Chair), Nina Eliasoph, Hajar Yazdiha, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Cavan Concannon
Email: cantori@usc.edu
PhD Date: May 2026 (Expected)
Dissertation Title: Global Elites Made in China: How do Wealthy Chinese Families Navigate Foreign College Education?
Areas of Research/Teaching: Sociology of Culture; Social Stratification; Transnational and Global Education; Contemporary China; Transnational Asia/Asian America; Economic Sociology; Organizational Theory; Qualitative Research Methods; Quantitative Research Methods
Dissertation Committee: Ann Owens (co-chair, UCLA), Dan Schrage (co-chair, USC), Elizabeth Currid-Halkett (Internal member outside of department, USC Price), Laura Miller (External member, Brandeis)
Email: ruiyili@usc.edu
Work in Progress:
Li, Ruiyi. “How do organizational characteristics shape grassroots organizations’ survival strategies in China?” (Under Review)
Li, Ruiyi. “Assistive Parenting: How Chinese Elite Families Prepare for Studying Abroad?” (Ready for submission)
PhD Date: May 2026 (Expected)
Dissertation Title: Culture(s) of Activism: Investigating Domestic Worker Organizing in India and the US.
Areas of Research/Teaching: Gender and Migration; Economic Sociology; Sociology of Culture; Political Sociology; Labor Movements; Qualitative Methods; Feminist Ethnography; Global and Transnational Sociology
Dissertation Committee: Hajar Yazdiha (co-chair, USC), Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, (co-chair, Princeton), Nina Eliasoph, Manuel Pastor, and Eliz Sanasarian
Email: kpandey@usc.edu
Recent Publications:
Pandey, Kritika. 2025. “Caught between hostile worlds and connected lives: everyday inequalities, fraught intimacies and the fight for domestic worker rights”. (Under review at Economy and Society)
Pandey, Kritika. 2023. “Aid and the Help: International Development and Transnational Extraction of Care” (By Hannaford, Dinah), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Med. Anthropology Quarterly.
2022 “Care Chain.” with Rhacel Salazar Parreñas and Gianne Sheena Sabio, in Routledge Handbook on Immigration and Refugee Studies. Eds. Anna Triandafyllidou. Routledge.
Pandey, Kritika*, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas* and Gianne Sheena Sabio*. 2021. “Essential and Expendable: Migrant Domestic Workers and the COVID-19 Pandemic.” American Behavioral Scientist, 65(10): 1287-1301. (*This article was an equal coauthorship)
PhD Date: May 2026 (Expected)
Dissertation Title: Stratification at the Starting Gate: Investigating Heterogeneous Neighborhood Effects on School Readiness by Race/Ethnicity, Socioeconomic Status, and Neighborhood Trajectory
Areas of Research/Teaching: Urban Sociology; Sociology of Education; Social Stratification; Health; Race/Ethnicity; Quantitative Methods
Dissertation Committee: Ann Owens (co-chair, UCLA), Dan Schrage (co-chair, USC), Manuel Pastor, and Jennifer Ailshire
Email: thaliato@usc.edu
Recent Publications:
Kye, Samuel H. and Thalia Tom. 2025. “What drives educational segregation and which communities are affected? Findings from a decomposition approach.” Social Science Research, volume 133.
Brazil, Noli, Jennifer Candipan, Brian Levy, and Thalia Tom. 2025. “Beyond the Residential Neighborhood: A Scoping Review of Research on Urban Neighborhood Networks.” Social Science & Medicine 372(117945).
Owens, Ann, and Thalia Tom. 2024. “Intersecting Inequalities: Racial/Ethnic and Socioeconomic Differences in Math Achievement and School Contexts in California.” Social Problems 71(3): 720-747.
Friedman, Samantha, and Thalia Tom. 2023. “Residential Segregation by Education in the U.S.: 2016-2020.” in Recent Trends in Demographic Data, edited by Parfait M. Eloundou-Enyegue. IntechOpen.
DiRago, Nicholas, Meiying Li, Thalia Tom, Will Schupmann, Yvonne Carrillo, Colleen M. Carey, and Michael S. Gaddis. 2022. “COVID-19 Vaccine Rollouts and the Reproduction of Urban Spatial Inequality: Disparities Within Large U.S. Cities in March and April 2021 by Racial/Ethnic and Socioeconomic Composition.” Journal of Urban Health 99:191-207.
