Department of Sociology, Yale University, 493 College Street, New Haven, CT 06511
mattias.smangs@yale.edu
mattias.smangs@yale.edu
I am a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Yale University. My published research spans several substantive and theoretical fields, for example, sociology of race and ethnicity, the sociology of crime and violence, cultural sociology, social network analysis, organizational sociology, and economic sociology. My publications include research on economic organization, particularly business groups; research using social network theory and methodology to address criminological debates about the nature and significance of juvenile delinquents’ social skills and peer relations; and research on the agrarian populist social movement’s link to Christian evangelicalism in the U.S. South in the 1890s. My articles have appeared in American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Social Problems, Sociological Science, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Science History, Organization, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, and Sociology Compass (links to my articles are under the "Publications" tab).
In recent years, my research has primarily focused on the historical and cultural sociology of race and racial violence in the United States. In my first book, Doing Violence, Making Race: Lynching and White Racial Group Formation in the U.S. South, 1882-1930, I develop a theoretical framework linking intergroup violence and group-formation processes such as the activation and maintenance of group categories, boundaries, and identities on the collective as well as individual level. Drawing upon detailed data from the southern states Georgia and Louisiana from 1882 to 1930 that differentiate lynchings according to communality, ceremony, brutality, and publicity, I demonstrate that “public” lynchings, representing collective violence involving larger mobs of perpetrators and spectators as well as ceremonial violence, and “private” lynchings, representing interpersonal violence perpetrated by small groups outside the public purview without manifest ceremony, were driven by cultural meanings and social forces at different levels of analysis. Public, but not private, lynchings were expressive as well as generative of the collective racial white identity and solidarity channeled through the southern Democratic Party at the turn of the 20th century. Private, but not public, lynchings originated in whites’ interracial status and social identity concerns on the interpersonal level. As such, my study theoretically elaborates and empirically demonstrates how different forms of racial violence fed off and into the racial boundaries, categories, and identities upon which the emerging Jim Crow system of racial domination and oppression rested.
In my current book project, Raging for Order and Domination: The Politics of Social Change and Lynching in the New South (under contract with Columbia University Press), I explore links between the lynching phenomenon and broad processes of social change previously unattended to by sociological research, including urbanization, industrialization, changing familial and gender relations, and state formation. An article from this project, “Race, Gender, and the Rape-Lynching Nexus in the U.S. South, 1881-1930” (forthcoming in Social Problems), explores the contextual conditions wherein lynchings related to alleged sexual assaults or transgressions by African American men against white women and girls were more likely to occur. The results suggest that traditional ideals of white male racial and gender status and dominance not merely served post hoc exculpatory purposes used to cover up the “real” interests behind such lynchings, but culturally and socially influenced their occurrence. In so doing, lynchings related to alleged interracial sexual assaults not only served to oppress African American men but to disempower white women as well.
In recent years, my research has primarily focused on the historical and cultural sociology of race and racial violence in the United States. In my first book, Doing Violence, Making Race: Lynching and White Racial Group Formation in the U.S. South, 1882-1930, I develop a theoretical framework linking intergroup violence and group-formation processes such as the activation and maintenance of group categories, boundaries, and identities on the collective as well as individual level. Drawing upon detailed data from the southern states Georgia and Louisiana from 1882 to 1930 that differentiate lynchings according to communality, ceremony, brutality, and publicity, I demonstrate that “public” lynchings, representing collective violence involving larger mobs of perpetrators and spectators as well as ceremonial violence, and “private” lynchings, representing interpersonal violence perpetrated by small groups outside the public purview without manifest ceremony, were driven by cultural meanings and social forces at different levels of analysis. Public, but not private, lynchings were expressive as well as generative of the collective racial white identity and solidarity channeled through the southern Democratic Party at the turn of the 20th century. Private, but not public, lynchings originated in whites’ interracial status and social identity concerns on the interpersonal level. As such, my study theoretically elaborates and empirically demonstrates how different forms of racial violence fed off and into the racial boundaries, categories, and identities upon which the emerging Jim Crow system of racial domination and oppression rested.
In my current book project, Raging for Order and Domination: The Politics of Social Change and Lynching in the New South (under contract with Columbia University Press), I explore links between the lynching phenomenon and broad processes of social change previously unattended to by sociological research, including urbanization, industrialization, changing familial and gender relations, and state formation. An article from this project, “Race, Gender, and the Rape-Lynching Nexus in the U.S. South, 1881-1930” (forthcoming in Social Problems), explores the contextual conditions wherein lynchings related to alleged sexual assaults or transgressions by African American men against white women and girls were more likely to occur. The results suggest that traditional ideals of white male racial and gender status and dominance not merely served post hoc exculpatory purposes used to cover up the “real” interests behind such lynchings, but culturally and socially influenced their occurrence. In so doing, lynchings related to alleged interracial sexual assaults not only served to oppress African American men but to disempower white women as well.