John S. Mahoney (Ph.D., University of Virginia, 1983)

Bird House, room 303
Tel.: (804) 828-6515
E-mail: jmahoney@saturn.vcu.edu
Personal web: http://www.people.vcu.edu/~jmahoney/

Specialty Areas

Collective behavior/social movements, race/ethnic/minority relations

Biographical Sketch

I was born and raised in Massachusetts and left that state in the late 1960s to attend the University of Virginia on a NROTC Scholarship. Graduating with a degree in psychology, I served for four years on active duty aboard two ships before returning to U.Va. to pursue graduate studies in sociology. I retired from the Naval Reserve in 1999. After receiving my Ph.D. I taught for several years at the University of Richmond before coming to VCU in 1988. During my tenure at VCU, I direct three off-campus programs designed to meet the educational needs of adult students and am currently the undergraduate program director in sociology responsible for advising all our majors. My primary areas of interest in sociology include minorities, social organizations, community studies, and collective behavior.

As an undergraduate student majoring in physiological and experimental psychology, I did not value of the sociological view of human behavior until, looking for a free elective my senior year, I enrolled in a social problems course. From that point on, I was hooked. To me, sociology emphasizes a perspective that few other disciplines address adequately—the social forces that impact our everyday lives. This is what C.Wright Mills called the “sociological imagination.” This fundamental concept, along with Charles Horton Cooley’s “looking glass self,” and W. I. Thomas’s theorem opened my eyes to the social world and provided levels of understanding that were totally new and still continue to fascinate me. My most recent research interests have been in the areas of race and ethnicity, collective behavior, and the media.