College of Arts and Sciences

Education:

• PhD, Sociology, Temple University, 1982

Curriculum Vitae:

Download (PDF)

Research Interests:

• War, Genocide, Torture, and Human Rights
• Macro-Moral Reasoning in Public Sphere Debate
• Contemporary Social Theory
• Moral and Political Communication
• Religion

Bio:

Douglas Porpora is professor at Drexel University and has published widely on social theory. Among his books are "The Concept of Social Structure" (Greenwood 1987), "How Holocausts Happen: The United States in Central America" (Temple 1992) and "Landscapes of the Soul: The Loss of Moral Meaning in American Life" (Oxford 2001).

Selected Publications:

• Post-Ethical Society: The Iraq War, Abu Ghraib, and the Moral Failure of the Secular. Douglas Porpora, Alexander Nikolaev, Julia Hagemann, and Alexander Jenkins. Forthcoming, University of Chicago Press.
• Douglas Porpora (2013) “How Many Thoughts Are There? Or Why We Likely Have No Tegmark Duplicates 1010^115 meters Away.” Philosophical Studies 163:133–149.
• Tyson Mitman, Alexander Nikolaev and Douglas Porpora (2012) “The Critical Moral Voice on U.S. Newspaper Opinion Pages” Communication, Culture, and Critique 5 (3): 392-408.
• Alexander Jenkins, Alexander Nikolaev, and Douglas Porpora (2012) “Moral Reasoning and the Online Debate about Iraq” Political Communication 29:1, 44-63.
• Magali Sarfatti Larson and Douglas Porpora (2011) “The Resistible Rise of Sarah Palin” in Sociological Forum 26 (4): 754-778.
• Douglas Porpora (2011) “Critical Terrorism Studies: A Political Economic Approach Grounded in Critical Realism.” Critical Studies on Terrorism 4 (1): 39-56.
• Douglas Porpora, Alexander Nikolaev, and Julia Hagemann. Torture, Abuse, Frames, and the Washington Post. Journal of Communication. 60(2): 254-270, June 2010.
• Talking War: How Elite U.S. Newspaper Editorials and Opinion Pieces Debated the Attack on Iraq. With Alexander Nikolaev. Sociological Focus. 40 (1): 6-25, 2007.
• Methodological Atheism, Methodological Agnosticism, and Religious Experience. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. 36 (1): 57-75, 2006.
• Transcendence: Critical Realism and God. With Margaret Archer and Andrew Collier. London: Routledge. 2004.
• Landscapes of the Soul: The Loss of Moral Meaning in American Life. New York: Oxford University Press. 2001.
• How Holocausts Happen: The United States in Central America. Philadelphia: Temple University. 1990.
• The Concept of Social Structure. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. 1987.