Karen A. Cerulo (born January 25, 1957, in Perth Amboy, New Jersey) is an American sociologist specializing in the study of culture, communication and cognition. Currently, she is a professor emeritus of Sociology at Rutgers University and working as an active consultant and mentor. She is the former editor of Sociological Forum, the flagship journal of the Eastern Sociological Society. From 2009 to 2010, she served as the Chair of the American Sociological Association's Culture section, and since 1999, she has directed the section's Culture and Cognition Network. Her book Identity Designs: The Sights and Sounds of a Nation won the section's award for the best book of 1996 and her article "Scents and Sensibilities: Olfaction, Sense-making and Meaning Attribution" won the section's 2019 Clifford Geertz Prize for Best Article. Her co-authored book Dreams of a Lifetime: How Who We Are Shapes How We Imagine Our Future (with Janet M. Ruane) won the section's Mary Douglas Best Book Award in 2023. Cerulo is a former Vice President of the Eastern Sociological Society. See p. 4., accessed June 10, 2015. In 2013, she was named the Robin M. Williams Jr. Lecturer by the Eastern Sociological Society; she won that organization's Merit Award in the same year. In 2019, she was elected to the Sociological Research Association.
Background Cerulo earned her B.A. from Rutgers University, graduating summa cum laude in 1980. She received her M.A. (1983) and Ph.D. (1985) in sociology from Princeton University. Her dissertation was titled "Social Solidarity and Its Effects on Musical Communication: An Empirical Analysis Of National Anthems." She graduated with departmental honors.
Cerulo was an assistant professor of sociology at Stony Brook University from 1985 to 1990. She joined the faculty of Rutgers University in the fall of 1990. In 1994, she received the School of Arts and Sciences' "Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education." In 2012, she won the university's "Scholar-Teacher Award", See section on Awards. Accessed December 11, 2023. an honor bestowed on faculty persons who have made outstanding contributions in both research and teaching. She chaired the Rutgers sociology department from 2009 to 2012.
Scholarship
Much of Cerulo's work revolves around symbol systems and their role in communication. She studies both verbal and nonverbal systems, including language, music, graphic images, and scents. While most people focus on the content of symbols, Cerulo prioritizes symbolic structure. She defines symbolic structure as the spatial or temporal organization of a symbol's constituent parts—i.e. the ways in which colors and shapes are combined in visual images or notes, sounds, odors or words are temporally sequenced in musical, olfactory or verbal messages. Cerulo argues that structure, like content, carries meaning for those creating and receiving symbol based messages. Therefore, it is important to understand how symbolic structure resonates with those involved in the communication process. Cerulo unfolds this agenda in several articlesCerulo, Karen A. (1984) "Social Disruption and Its Effects on Music: An Empirical Analysis." Social Forces 62(4): 885-904.Cerulo, Karen A. (1988) "What's Wrong With This Picture?: Enhancing Communication Effectiveness Through Syntactic or Semantic Distortion." Communication Research 15(1): 93-101.Cerulo, Karen A. (1989) "Socio-Political Control and the Structure of National Symbols: An Empirical Analysis of National Anthems." Social Forces 68(1): 76-99.Cerulo, Karen A. (1993) "Symbols and the World-System: National Anthems and Flags." Sociological Forum 8(2): 243-272.Cerulo, Karen A. (1995) "Designs on the White House: TV Ads, Message Structure, and Election Outcome." Research in Political Sociology vol. 7: 63-88.Cerulo, Karen and Janet M. Ruane. (2014) "Apologies of the Rich and Famous: Social, Cultural and Cognitive Explanations of Why We Care and Why We Forgive." Social Psychology Quarterly 77(2): 123-149. and two of her books: Identity Designs: The Sights and Sounds of a Nation and Deciphering Violence: The Cognitive Structure of Right and Wrong. These works highlight two important findings. First, Cerulo shows that certain symbolic structures are associated with predictable reactions from those receiving messages. By uncovering and understanding these patterns, she argues, one can greatly enhance communication effectiveness. Second, she demonstrates that symbol structures vary in predictable ways according to the sociocultural conditions under which they are produced or projected. Contextual factors such as cultural heterogeneity, political or social stability, existing power structures, dominant systems of economic exchange, professional norms of expression, the nature of social ties, or levels of "collective focus" are all associated with certain variants of symbolic structure. (Collective focus is a concept developed by Cerulo to gauge the points of attention to which a collective body is directed at a given moment;Cerulo, Karen A. (1995). Identity Designs: The Sights and Sounds of A Nation. The Arnold and Caroline Rose Book Series of the American Sociological Association. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. .Cerulo, Karen A. (2002) "Individualism Pro Tem: Reconsidering U.S. Social Relations." Pp. 135-171 in K. A. Cerulo (ed.), Culture In Mind: Toward A Sociology of Culture and Cognition. New York: Routledge. others have since utilized the term.Purcell, Kristen. (1997). "Towards a Communication Dialectic: Embedded Technology and the Enhancement of Place*." Sociological inquiry 67(1): 101-112.Keogan, Kevin. (2002). "A sense of place: the politics of immigration and the symbolic construction of identity in southern California and the New York metropolitan area." Sociological Forum 17(2): 223-253.Liao, Tim F., Gehui Zhang, and Libin Zhang. (2012). "Social foundations of national anthems: theorizing for a better understanding of the changing fate of the national anthem of China." Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 42(1): 106-127.) Some describe Cerulo's work on symbolic communication as a "demonstration of research ingenuity,"Athens, Lonnie. (1999). "Review of Deciphering Violence: The Cognitive Structure of Right and Wrong." Contemporary Sociology 28(5): 581-582. one that "makes important contributions to debates about meaning and measurement."Spillman, Lynette. (1997). "Review of Identity Designs: The Sights and Sounds of a Nation." Contemporary Sociology 26(2): 244-245. Moreover, "her answers to questions of how rather than what symbols communicate merit the attention of all scholars working in the sociology of culture and symbolic anthropology."Schwartz, Barry. (1997). "Review of Identity Designs: The Sights and Sounds of a Nation." Sociological Inquiry 67(1): 125-127.
In line with her interest in symbolic communication, Cerulo has developed a number of quantitative indicators that capture the essence of symbol structures.Cerulo, Karen A. (1988) "Analyzing Cultural Products: A New Method of Measurement." Social Science Research 17: 317-352.Cerulo, Karen A. (1998) Deciphering Violence: The Cognitive Structure of Right and Wrong. New York/London: Routledge. .Cerulo, Karen A. (2015) "The Embodied Mind: Building on Wacquant’s Carnal Sociology." Qualitative Sociology 38: 1: 33-38.Cerulo, Karen A. (2018). "Scents and Sensibilities: Olfaction, Sense-making and Meaning Attribution." American Sociological Review 83(2): 361-389. For example, her measures of musical structure capture elements of melodic, harmonic and rhythmic motion, ornamentation and dissonance. Her measures of graphic images capture levels of density, contrast and distortion. In dealing with scents, she measures the diversity, contrast and temporal ordering of scent components. These measures allow one to classify the relative complexity of symbol structures. As a result, Cerulo's measures make cultural objects such as paintings, logos, anthems, songs, even perfumes accessible sources of social science data, amenable to the field's most rigorous analytic methods. The development of these measures earned Cerulo recognition as "a methodological pioneer in symbolic research."Schoenhals, Mark. (1996). "Review of Identity Designs: The Sights and Sounds of a Nation." American Journal of Sociology 1(2): 603-604.
In addition to studying the tools of communication, Cerulo is also interested in communication media. She has written extensively on the ways in which new communication technologies can change definitions and perceptions of social actors, social groups, and appropriate sites of action. She also problematizes the distinction between direct and mediated communication and she explores the contexts in which social connectedness and social cohesion develop in lieu of physical co-presence.Cerulo, Karen A., Ruane, Janet M. and Chayko, Mary. (1992) "Technological Ties That Bind: Media-Centered Primary Groups." Communication Research 19(1): 109-129.Cerulo, Karen A. (1997) "Re-framing Sociological Concepts for a Brave New (Virtual?) World." Sociological Inquiry 67(1): 48-58.Cerulo, Karen A. and Ruane, Janet M. (1997) "Death Comes Alive: Technology and the Re-conception of Death." Science As Culture vol. 6 no. 28 part 3: 444-466.Cerulo, Karen A. (1997) "Identity Construction." Annual Review of Sociology. Vol. 23: 385-409.Cerulo, Karen A. and Ruane, Janet M. (1998) "Coming Together: New Taxonomies for the Analysis of Social Relations." Sociological Inquiry 68(3): 398-425.Cerulo, Karen A. ( 2002) "Individualism Pro Tem: Reconsidering U.S. Social Relations." Pp. 135-171 in K. A. Cerulo (ed.), Culture In Mind: Toward A Sociology of Culture and Cognition. New York: Routledge.Cerulo, Karen A. and Barra, Andrea. (2008) "In the Name of …: Legitimate Interactants in the Dialogue of Prayer." Poetics 36: 5-6: 374–388.Cerulo, Karen A. (2009) "Non-Humans in Social Interaction." Annual Review of Sociology vol. 35: 531-552.Cerulo, Karen A. (2014) "Communication in the Internet Age." Pp. 370-378 in M. Sasaki et al. (eds.) The Concise Encyclopedia of Comparative Sociology. The Netherlands: Brill Her latest work explores perceived interactions with the dead. Her work "presents a sophisticated typology of forms of interaction which goes beyond simple dichotomies like direct vs. mediated."Diani, Mario. 1999. "Social Movement Networks Virtual and Real." http://www3.nd.edu/~dmyers/cbsm/vol2/bgham99.pdf , accessed May 16, 2022