John Levi Martin (born 1964) is an American sociologist and the Florence Borchert Bartling Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of five books: Thinking Through Statistics, Thinking Through Methods, Thinking Through Theory, Social Structures, The Explanation of Social Action, the latter two of which have both won the Theory Prize for Outstanding Book from the ASA's Theory Section. He has also written data analysis programs such as DAMN (Dyadic Analysis of Multiple Networks) and ELLA (Every-gal-and-guy’s Latent Lattice Analyser).

Early life and education

Martin studied at Wesleyan University and received a BA in sociology and English in 1987. While there he was influenced by notable political sociologist Herbert Hyman who died in 1985, and Martin received the Herbert Hyman prize for undergraduate sociology for his thesis: The Epistemology of Fundamentalism. He then attended the University of California - Berkeley, where he received a MA in 1990 and a PhD in 1997. His dissertation committee was Ann Swidler (Chair), Mike Hout, James Wiley, John Wilmoth. It was titled Power Structure and Belief Structure in Forty American Communes, and used the Urban Commune Data Set.

Areas of activity

John Levi Martin's current main areas of interest are field theory, social structures, and party formation. His previous work has been on classical theory, historical changes in sexual decision making and the economy, the shaping of belief systems, the use of race as a conceptual category in American sociology, the relationship between interpersonal power and attributions of sexiness, methods for the analysis of qualitative data, political psychology, and the division of labor in Busytown.

Selected works