John Levi Martin

Florence Borchert Bartling Professor, Department of Sociology

John Levi Martin received a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley, where he was recently a professor, after being a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and an assistant professor at Rutgers—The State University of New Jersey at New Brunswick. He is now a professor at the University of Chicago at Chicago, where he enjoys teaching classical theory and writing about himself in the third person.

He is best known for his mathematical modeling of the occupational standing of imaginary animals in a single children’s book; he has also written on, and occasionally researched, the formal properties of belief systems and social structures, the constitutional convention of 1787, the rationalization of infantry war, and the use of race as a conceptual category in American sociology. He recently finished a book that he started ten years ago, and enjoyed it so much that he is seriously considering reading another one again some time in the future.

jlmartin@uchicago.edu | CV | Personal Website

Select Publications

2018 Thinking Through Statistics. University of Chicago Press.

2017 Thinking through Methods. University of Chicago Press.

2015 Thinking Through Theory. Norton.

2011 The Explanation of Social Action. Oxford University Press.

2009 Social Structures. Princeton University Press.

2007 (With Adam Slez:) “Political Action and Party Formation in the United States Constitutional Convention.” American Sociological Review 72:42-67.

2006 “Jointness and Duality in Algebraic Approaches to Dichotomous Data.” Sociological Methods and Research 35:159-192.

2003 “What is Field Theory” American Journal of Sociology 109:1:49

2002 “Power, Authority, and the Constraint of Belief Systems.” American Journal of Sociology, 107: 861-904.