Dr. Saylor Breckenridge joined the Wake Forest University faculty in the Fall of 2001 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and has since been promoted to Associate Professor. He has earned degrees in both Sociology and Mathematics and his interests are broadly oriented toward economic and organizational sociology and social networks. He has used these theoretical orientations as a means to explore the death care industry and several facets of popular culture, among other topics. He has extensive training and experience in a wide range of quantitative and qualitative methodologies; and his research pays particular attention to the use of large time-series data sets as the basis for insight into ecological processes (competition, selection, variation, and legitimation) in populations of organizations and patterns of production and consumption.

Professor Breckenridge's current projects include continuing analyses of competition and consolidation in the funeral home industry; explorations of the linkage between industrial structuring and genre variation in the U.S. comic book industry; investigating the role of race as a feature of social interaction that affects consumer behavior and competitive advantages among organizations via an analysis of Major League Baseball; and analyses of the transformation of agricultural organizations, focusing on the rise of wineries and vineyards in North Carolina.

His teaching efforts reflect these interests. In the Spring of 2006, he is teaching the following: Soc 151 - Principles of Sociology and Soc 371 - Social Statistics. In previous semesters he has taught Social Statistics, Social Research Methods, Social Theory, Principles/Introduction to Sociology, Social Problems, Organizational Sociology, Sociological Analysis of Popular Culture, Sociological Analysis of Film, the Honors' Seminar, and a First-Year Seminar on Competition, Cooperation, and Consumption. Additionally, Dr. Breckenridge has taken specific efforts to incoporate Undergraduate Research Fellows into his research efforts, providing advanced, detailed experience in sociological research to undergraduate Sociology majors.

During 2005-2006 and 2006-2007, Dr. Breckenridge was the Faculty Advisor for the Wake Forest University Service Learning Program in Vietnam. In the Winter of each of these academic years, he worked with groups of students on projects building schools in Vietnam's Mekong Delta.

In the summer of 2007, Dr. Breckenridge will begin a multi-year summer study abroad program in Vietnam. This program stemmed form the previous winter enterprises but is based on a grant enabling students from all ACC schools to engage in the program - a six-week semester consisting of tradtional coursework at a university in Vietnam along with a service-learning component.

During the Fall of 2007, Dr. Breckenridge will be the Director of the Wake Forest Study Abroad Program at Kansai Gaidai University, Hirakata City, Japan.

From the fall of 2008 through the summer of 2009, Dr. Breckenridge will be off-campus operating as the National Science Foundation Program Manager of the Methodology, Measurement, and Statistics Program under the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, VA.

For a CV and other information, please visit his homepage.