Jeffrey C. Alexander

Jeffrey C. Alexander is an American sociologist, born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1947, who holds the Lillian Chavenson Saden professorship of sociology at Yale University and co-directs its Center for Cultural Sociology. He developed the strong program in cultural sociology, which treats culture as an independent force shaping social action and institutions rather than a mere reflection of economic or political structure, and introduced the concept of cultural trauma, the argument that traumatic events become devastating through cultural processes of construction rather than being inherently so. He also proposed neofunctionalism, a revival of Talcott Parsons's sociology emphasizing multidimensional analysis and human agency, and wrote on social performance and cultural pragmatics. He earned his doctorate at Berkeley under Robert N. Bellah and taught at UCLA before moving to Yale in 2001.