Peter Bearman

The (Protestant) Bible, the (Printed) Sermon, and the Word(s): The Semantic Structure of the Conformist and Dissenting Bible, 1660-1780.

Peter Shawn Bearman (born 1956) is an American sociologist, notable for his contributions to the fields of adolescent health, research design, structural analysis, textual analysis, oral history and social networks.

He is the Jonathan R. Cole Professor of Social Science in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University, the President of the American Assembly at Columbia University, as well as the director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE).

He is also the founding director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, and co-founding director of Columbia's Oral History Master of Arts Program, the first oral history masters program in the country.

Bearman received his B.A. in sociology from Brown University in 1978, magna cum laude, and his M.A. (1982) and Ph.D. (1985) in sociology from Harvard University.

After receiving his PhD, he was a lecturer at Harvard, before joining the sociology department at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

There he moved from assistant professor to full professor by 1996, before moving to Columbia University in 1997.

At Columbia, Bearman was chair of the department of sociology from 2001-2005 and chair of the department of statistics from 2007-2008.

Between 2002 and 2003, he was a visiting professor at the University of Genoa, Italy, the University of Munich.

He has chaired 50 doctoral dissertations.

Bearman was the founding director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, and is currently the director of INCITE, the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics at Columbia University.

He was also co-founding director of Columbia's Oral History Master of Arts program and co-founding director of the Global Health Research Center in Central Asia.

He is currently co-editor of the Oral History Series and the Middle Range Series, both published by Columbia University Press.

He has also been on the editorial board of several scholarly journals, including the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, and Sociological Theory.

With co-authors Katherine Stovel, and James Moody, Bearman received the A Roger V. Gould Prize in 2004 for his article “Chains of Affection: The Structure of Adolescent Romantic and Sexual Networks.” The editorial board of the American Journal of Sociology selects one article published in the journal for a two-year period.

They award the prize to an article that is "empirically rigorous, theoretically grounded, and lucidly written."

Bearman is the author of Doormen (University of Chicago Press, 2005), an ethnographic study of doormen in New York City, and is the co-author of Working for Respect: Community and Conflict at Walmart with Adam Reich (Columbia University Press, 2018).

In 2007, Bearman was awarded the National Institute of Health (NIH) Director's Pioneer Award to investigated the social determinants of the autism epidemic.

He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008, a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014, a Guggenheim Fellow in 2016, and a member of the National Academy of Medicine in 2019.

Bearman, along with J. Richard Udry, designed the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), currently the only nationally-representative study of adolescent sexuality in the United States, which has yielded over a thousand published research articles and received the 2016 Golden Goose Award.

From these data, Bearman has published seminal articles on the sexual network, virginity pledges, same sex attraction, and adolescent suicidality.

He is widely credited with bringing social network analysis methods to the demographic and population research community.

He also introduced social network approaches to social sequence analysis through the concept of narrative networks.

Bearman currently directs the Robert Wood Johnson Program in population health at Columbia University.

He has received major grants and contracts from the National Science Foundation, the American Legacy Foundation, the Office of Population Affairs National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Child Health and Development, The Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, totaling over $20,000,000.

2018     Zerubavel, Noam, Mark Hoffman, Adam Reich, Kevin Ochsner and Peter Bearman*.

Neural Precursors of Future Liking and its Mutual Reciprocation.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1802176115.

29632195 (PubMed)

2018     Balian, Hrag and Peter Bearman*.

Pathways to Violence: Dynamics for the Continuation of Large-Scale Conflict.

Sociological Theory.

36 (2), 210-220

2018     Hoffman, Mark, JP Cointet, Phiipp Brandt, Newton E. Key, and Peter Bearman*.

Poetics. Volume 68, June 2018, Pages 89–103 (American Sociological Association Religion Section Distinguished Article Award, 2018)

2018     Bearman, Peter.

Notes for Heuristics of Discovery.

He is also co-editor of After the Fall, an oral history documenting New Yorkers' recollections of the September 11 attacks, as well as Robert Rauschenberg: An Oral History, which is to be published in 2019.

Reviewed in: European Sociological Review (Symposium), JASS, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Revista, Sociologica, Acta Sociological, Contemporary Sociology

The most recent among his 60+ peer-reviewed articles are: