Smith, Christi M. 2016. Reparation and Reconciliation: The Rise and Fall of Integrated Higher Education. University of North Carolina Press.

This is the first book to reveal the nineteenth-century struggle for racial integration on U.S. college campuses. As the Civil War ended, the need to heal the scars of slavery, expand the middle class, and reunite the nation engendered a dramatic interest in higher education by policy makers, voluntary associations, and African Americans more broadly. Through a detailed analysis of archival and press data, Christi M. Smith demonstrates that pressures between organizations–including charities and foundations–and the emergent field of competitive higher education led to the differentiation and exclusion of African Americans, Appalachian whites, and white women from coeducational higher education and illuminates the actors and the strategies that led to the persistent salience of race over other social boundaries.

Reparation and Reconciliation was recently the focus of a profile in Inside Higher Ed. 

Smith, Robert B. 2017. Social Structure and Voting in the United States. Springer.

This book advances theorizing and research in political sociology drawing upon the writings of Seymour Martin Lipset, Daniel Bell, Juan Linz, Paul Lazarsfeld, and other sociologists and political scientists.  To study how ideologies and social structure affect voting decisions, this book applies contemporary statistical modeling methods: multilevel models, structural equation models, and domain analysis.  The SAS data sets and SAS code can be downloaded from the Springer website for replication, reanalysis, and study.  The coda suggests how the findings bear on the recent election of Donald Trump.

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Parves, Z. Fareen. 2017. Politicizing Islam: The Islamic Revival in France and India. Oxford University Press.

Home to the largest Muslim minorities in Western Europe and Asia, France and India are both grappling with crises of secularism. In Politicizing Islam, Fareen Parvez offers an in-depth look at how Muslims have responded to these crises, focusing on Islamic revival movements in the French city of Lyon and the Indian city of Hyderabad. Presenting a novel comparative view of middle-class and poor Muslims in both cities, Parvez illuminates how Muslims from every social class are denigrated but struggle in different ways to improve their lives and make claims on the state. In Hyderabad’s slums, Muslims have created vibrant political communities, while in Lyon’s banlieues they have retreated into the private sphere. Politicizing Islam elegantly explains how these divergent reactions originated in India’s flexible secularism and France’s militant secularism and in specific patterns of Muslim class relations in both cities. This fine-grained ethnography pushes beyond stereotypes and has consequences for burning public debates over Islam, feminism, and secular democracy.