Updated 2025-Sep-25

David C. Sorge

Appointments

2023-now Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology, Bryn Mawr College

• Specializations: Social Movements, Violence, Theory, Criminal Justice, Emotions, Global/Transnational Sociology, Postcolonial Sociology

Education

2022 Ph.D., Sociology, University of Pennsylvania

• Dissertation: Three Essays in the Sociology of Violence: Repertoire Paralysis, Localized Diffusion, and Emotional Interventions in De-Escalation
• Committee: Randall Collins (co-chair), Guobin Yang (co-chair), Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi, Raheel Dhattiwala
• Comprehensive Exams: Sociology of Violence; Social Movements
• Additional Certifications: Certificate in College and University Teaching

2014 A.M., Sociology, University of Pennsylvania

• Thesis: Riots in India: Emotional Dynamics and the Means of Political Manipulation
• Committee: Randall Collins (Chair), Guobin Yang, Lisa Mitchell

2012 Post Graduate Diploma, Peace Studies, Henry Martyn Institute

• Field Placements: Hyderabad, Colombo, Ahmedabad

2011 B.A., Linguistics and Asian Studies, cum laude, Rice University

Language Competencies

• Dhivehi Spoken: Near Fluent Written: Advanced
• Hindi Spoken: Conversant Written: Advanced
• Urdu Spoken: Conversant Written: Advanced
• German Spoken: Conversant Written: Advanced
• Arabic Spoken: Beginner Written: Intermediate

Software Proficiencies

Python, R, STATA, SPSS, GIS, Gplates, ClimaSim, ORA, Atlas.ti, NVivo, NLP, Praat, DaVinci Resolve,Audacity, Inkscape, Paint.net, Obsidian

Publications

Published

D. Michael Lindsay, Ariela Schachter, Jeremy R. Porter, and David C. Sorge, 2014. “Parvenus and Conflict in Elite Cohorts” Social Science Research 47:14

In Preparation

David C. Sorge, “When Emotions Work: A Single-Case Analysis of De-escalation.”, Under revision for revise-and-resubmit

David C. Sorge, “Ethno-religious Unrest in India: Emergent Phenomenon or Evolving Performance?”, Under review

David C. Sorge, “Diffusion and Collective Violence in India.”, Under review

David C. Sorge, “Riots as Interaction Ritual Webs” (In preparation)

David C. Sorge, “Riots, Morals, and Violent Elites” (In preparation)

Current Projects

David C. Sorge, “Multi-Modal Analyses of Escalation and De-escalation in Riots”

David C. Sorge, “Building a Protest Event Dataset for India”

David C. Sorge, “Deviant Cases of Unrest as Tools for Theorizing”

David C. Sorge, “Escalating sentiment and community polarization in the lead up to collective violence”

Presentations

2025 David C. Sorge “Ethno-religious unrest in India: Emergent Phenomenon or Evolving Performance?” 2025 Meeting of the American Sociological Association – CBSM Roundtable Session (Chicago, IL)

2023 David C. Sorge “On the Diffusion of Collective Violence in India.” 2023 Meeting of the American Sociological Association – Roundtable Session (Philadelphia, PA)

2022 David C. Sorge, “Ethno-religious unrest in India: Emergent Phenomenon or Evolving Performance?” Mobilization-SDSU conference on Protest and Resistance in Contemporary Democracies (San Diego, CA)

2019 David C. Sorge, “Modelling Diffusion of Collective Action in India, 1980-2000,” Development in Dialogue, a conference of the Sociology of Development section of the ASA (South Bend, IN)

2018 David C. Sorge, Yuri Hosoda, Carol H. Y. Lo, Lisa Mikesell, Roslyn Rowen, Sarah J. White, and Nick J. Williams, “Syntactically Complete Turn-medial ‘I don’t know’.” 5th International Conference of Conversation Analysis, Loughborough Univ. (Loughborough, UK)

2016 David C. Sorge, “The De-Escalation of a School Shooting: Toward a Micro-Sociological Theory.” 2016 Meeting of the American Sociological Association (Seattle, WA)

2015 David C. Sorge, “Riots in India: Emotional Dynamics and the Means of Political Manipulation.” Complicating Violence: Moving Beyond Bounded Understandings, Northeastern University (Boston, MA)

Grants and Fellowships

2025 ACCESS Explore Allocation, National Science Foundation

2016 Pollak Summer Fellowship, Sociology Department, University of Pennsylvania

2013-2014 Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship, South Asia Center, University of Pennsylvania

2012-2018 Benjamin Franklin Fellowship, University of Pennsylvania

2011-2012 Wagoner Scholarship, Rice University

Additional Research Training

2025 Faculty Success Program, National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity (NCFDD)

2021 Summer Spatial Analysis Bootcamp, Penn Institute for Urban Research, University of Pennsylvania

2019-2020 Python for Humanists Workshop and Working Group, Price Lab for Digital Humanities, University of Pennsylvania

2019 Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS) Summer Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

2018 Summer Institute for Advanced Conversation Analysis, University of Colorado, Boulder

2018 Introductory Conversation Analysis Training Workshops, Rutgers University

2016 Writing/Designing Winning NSF Proposals, Grant Training Center

Teaching

As Instructor:

Fall 2025 + 2x prior Movements for Social Justice

• I designed and taught this course, in which students used several different theoretical lenses to study contemporary social movements including Black Lives Matter, Me Too, and the anti-Dakota Access Pipeline protests, as well as earlier twentieth-century movements. I used a central wiki-building activity to tie the course together.

Fall 2025 + 3x prior Social Theory

• I redesigned Bryn Mawr’s core Social Theory course to better reflect the diversity of topics and theorists taken up as conversation partners in contemporary sociology. The new version of the course begins with a module on theorizing as a component of the research process. During this module, students construct a theoretical explanation of a puzzling social phenomenon of their choosing from available observation. The latter part of the course proceeds thematically, with each semester’s themes chosen based on students’ projects. Each class session traces a single sociological theme, reading extracts from the sociological canon alongside more recent work developing and challenging early formulations.

Spring 2025 + 1x prior Social Dynamics of Violence

• I designed this elective course as a survey of work in the sociology of violence, ranging from topics typically covered in Criminology courses (murder, domestic violence, school shootings, drug market violence) to those typically covered in courses on Social Movements (riots, pogroms, and genocides) and those typically covered in Military Sociology (battle dynamics, military organization, and guerrilla warfare) or Political Sociology (state formation, revolution, and imperial collapse). The course offers an opportunity to compare features of violence that recur across scales of social action. A portfolio project allows students to explore particular forms of violence or cross-cutting themes in greater depth.

Fall 2025 + 2x prior Punishment and Social Order

• I redesigned this elective course as an ethnographic introduction to the US Criminal Legal System. Over the course of the semester, students read four ethnographies, one each related to policing, incarceration, criminal courts, and re-entry. These are supplemented with additional readings, mostly qualitative. Pride of place is given to the perspective of those punished, but students also read work that explores the social worlds of police, prison guards, lawyers, judges, family members, and those working to facilitate re-entry. Students are introduced to Restorative and Transformative Justice alternatives, as well as to traditional systems of restitution and experiments in criminal legal reform elsewhere in the world. Students produce policy briefs arguing, with evidence, for particular policies or pathways toward criminal justice reform.

Spring 2025 + 1x prior The Social Life of Emotions

• I designed and taught this course to introduce students to the contemporary sociology of emotions. Readings and discussions reintroduce students to emotions as culturally varied, yet more universally comprehensible than most linguistic codes, as products of situational structure and social norms, and as objects of agentic work and social exchange. A portfolio project allows students to explore particular emotions or social patterns of emotional experience in greater depth.

Fall 2023 From Conversation to Society: Microsociological Perspectives

• I designed and taught this course as a survey of several key theoretical approaches to micro-sociology, including symbolic interaction, dramaturgy, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and the phenomenology of the body. Later parts of the semester traced ways in which these microsociological approaches have enriched the study of meso-scale (networks, groups, organizations) and macro-scale (race, class, gender) sociological phenomena.

Fall 2023 Global Sociology: Capital, Power, and Protest in World-Historical Perspective

• I co-designed this seminar with students, exploring several key approaches to the study of global social phenomena, including world systems theory, transnational sociology, world ecology, and postcolonial studies of empire. The latter parts of the course provided opportunities to explore global scale social phenomena chosen by students, including global commodity chains, global patterns of inequality, media and tourist flows, NGO and missionary networks, transnational social movements, and the current wave of anti-global nationalism. Students produced portfolio projects that explored the multiplexity of political, economic, cultural, and ecological ties between two cities or other geographical locations.

Fall 2024 Varieties of Sociological Imagination: Voices from the Majority World

• I designed and taught this seminar to introduce students to a variety of social theories or forms of social analysis from various regions of the world–men and women from African, South American, Middle Eastern, South, Southeast, and East Asian cultural basins–whose work reflected critically or analytically on their own social worlds. Students read work exploring Southern, autonomous, indigenous, and connected modes of sociological theorizing as alternatives to Euro- and Anglocentric approaches to sociology.

Upcoming Social Problems/Community Conversations (Working Title)

• I am currently designing this course as an experimental seminar, to be held at a public library in an underserved neighborhood near Bryn Mawr. The intention is for current Bryn Mawr students to compose about half of the class, with the other half of the course composed of interested community members. The course will be co-constructed with students, exploring social problems of interest to those taking the course from a sociological perspective.

As Teaching Assistant:

Spring 2018 Intro to Sociology (Penn)

• I led discussions and used backward-design principles to create activities for two discussion- and activity-based recitation sessions of 20 students each.

Spring 2015 + 2x prior Intro to Social Research (Penn)

• In six recitations spread over three semesters, I helped over 110 students design and develop their own research projects. In addition, I led discussion sessions and designed and led in-class activities supporting the main lectures.

Spring 2019 Global and Regional Analysis (Lauder Institute, Penn)

• Graded student papers, designed exams, and hosted guest lecturers for Europe section.

Fall 2016 Medical Sociology (Penn)

• Graded student papers

Spring 2010 Introduction to Linguistics (Rice)

• Graded student papers

Additional Teaching Training:

2025 Belonging and Beyond: Using Future Histories to Reimagine Teaching and Learning, The Alliance to Advance Liberal Arts Colleges (AALAC)

2025 Belonging and Beyond: Telling Future Histories of Classrooms from 2050, The Alliance to Advance Liberal Arts Colleges (AALAC)

2024 Tuesday Teaching Talks, Bryn Mawr Teaching and Learning Institute

2024 The Art and Craft of Designing and Facilitating Learning Spaces, Kaospilot

2023 Teaching Toolkit Program, National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity (NCFDD)

2018 Inclusive Teaching Working Group, Center for Teaching and Learning, Penn

2016 Mini-course in Online Teaching, Center for Teaching and Learning, Penn

Mentorship

2025-2026 Senior Thesis Co-Advisor for Yang Zhang, Bryn Mawr

2025-2026 Senior Thesis Co-Advisor for E. “Jamie” James, Bryn Mawr

2024-2025 Senior Thesis Co-Advisor for Claire Brouillard, Bryn Mawr

2014 Graduate Student Mentor for Peter Harvey, Penn

2013 Graduate Student Mentor for Alex Hoppe, Penn

Professional Service

2024 Student Paper Award Committee, Peace, War, and Social Conflict Section, American Sociological Association

2020-2021 Professionalization Chair, Graduate Sociology Society, University of Pennsylvania

2012-2013 Departmental Representative, Graduate and Professional Students Association, University of Pennsylvania

Research Experience

2024-now
Principal Investigator, Dynamics of Aggression and Nonviolent Group Action (DANGA) Lab, Bryn Mawr College

• Leading a research lab investigating escalation and de-escalation in collective violence, integrating multimodal data analysis, computational methods, and qualitative case studies. Supervise student researchers and coordinate funded projects using high-performance computing resources.
• Associated Projects:
  • Multi-Modal Analyses of Escalation and De-escalation in Riots
    • Data: Newspapers, photos, video recordings of riot-like events
    • Methods: Multimodal event analysis, micro-sociology
    • Focus: Identifying turning points and emotional signals distinguishing spirals into violence from successful de-escalation.
  • Building a Protest Event Dataset for India
    • Data: Times of India archive
    • Methods: NLP, supervised classification, human-in-the-loop computational coding, HPC
    • Focus: Producing a national-scale dataset for studying coalition formation, tactical diffusion, and protest ecologies.
  • Deviant Cases of Unrest as Tools for Theorizing
    • Data: Quantitative unrest models, qualitative news sources
    • Methods: Case selection from statistical residuals, qualitative comparative analysis
    • Focus: Extending theoretical frameworks by analyzing unexpected cases of violence and nonviolence.
  • Escalating Sentiment and Community Polarization before Violence
    • Data: Twitter discourse on CAA/NRC, unrest in Delhi
    • Methods: Sentiment analysis, counter-escalation theory testing
    • Focus: Examining how polarization and discursive escalation correlated with collective violence in Delhi 2020.

2012–2022
Doctoral Researcher, Sociology Department, University of Pennsylvania

• Conducted dissertation research on the sociology of violence and de-escalation. Applied NLP to large-scale news corpora, event history models to diffusion processes, and micro-sociological analysis to crisis negotiations.
• Associated Projects:
  • When Emotions Work: A Single-Case Analysis of De-escalation
    • Data: Audio, video, and a participant memoir of a de-escalated school shooting threat
    • Methods: Discourse and interaction analysis
    • Finding: Emotional exhaustion and fortification processes enabled successful negotiation and surrender.
  • Ethno-religious Unrest in India: Emergent Phenomenon or Evolving Performance?
    • Data: 7.3M Times of India articles (1950–2000)
    • Methods: NLP, longitudinal verb-trend analysis
    • Finding: Core violence descriptors remained stable, even as contexts and responses changed.
  • Diffusion and Collective Violence in India
    • Data: Electoral, demographic, election and household data for all parliamentary constituencies in India
    • Methods: GIS-based estimation, event history diffusion modeling
    • Finding: Diffusion effects via state-level communication networks consistently outweighed demographic, economic, and electoral predictors.
  • Riots as Interaction Ritual Webs
    • Data: Secondary studies of Hindu/Muslim violence in South Asia
    • Methods: Interaction ritual theory
    • Finding: Collective violence follows patterned ritual sequences, escalating emotional entrainment up to standoff points.
  • Riots, Morals, and Violent Elites
    • Data: Secondary studies of Hindu/Muslim violence in South Asia
    • Methods: Qualitative comparisons of averted riots
    • Finding: When moral framings of a trigger are unclear or violent elites are absent, riots fizzle out.

2010–2012
Research Assistant, PLATINUM Project, Rice University & Gordon College

• Supported the largest study to date of Fortune 500 CEOs, cabinet secretaries, and U.S. presidents. Compiled research on interviewees, conducted textual analysis, and co-authored peer-reviewed work.
• Associated Projects:
  • Parvenus and Conflict in Elite Cohorts
    • Data: Survey of White House Fellows (n=475)
    • Methods: Hierarchical linear modeling
    • Finding: Women and minority fellows reported more conflict in more diverse cohorts, consistent with tokenism theory.

2012
Research Intern, Janvikas

• Visited IDP Colonies around Gujarat, India and edited report based on NGO’s survey of internally displaced persons (IDPs) from the 2002 Gujarat riots.
• Associated Projects:
  • Gujarat’s Internally Displaced: Ten Years Later
    • Data: Surveys of 83 IDP colonies across Gujarat, (n=16,087)
    • Methods: Neighborhood Surveys
    • Finding: Documented persistent displacement and poor living conditions a decade after the riots.

2009
Executive Office Intern, Ashoka: Innovators for the Public

• Planned events and provided research support for CEO and board-level initiatives at a global social entrepreneurship organization.
• Associated Projects:
  • Event coordination, background research briefs for CEO’s meetings.
  • Support staff for Ashoka’s annual board meeting.