Omar Lizardo
Omar Lizardo
Professor and LeRoy Neiman Term Chair
Office: 290 Haines Hall
Email: olizardo@soc.ucla.edu
Phone: 310-267-5438
Biography
I do empirical and theoretical work at the intersection of multiple fields.
My empirical work contributes to the fields of cultural sociology, historical sociology, social movement studies, culture and consumption studies, cognitive sociology, and network science. My theoretical work deals with general issues in classical and contemporary social theory with an emphasis on the link between practices, culture, cognition, and institutions.
One major strand of my empirical work deals with the relationship between social position and cultural taste at multiple levels of analysis (e.g., individual, institutional, cross-national) and time-scales (from contemporary to historical). The primary focus of this research seeks to account for patterns of cultural change, especially those related to institutionalized forms of cultural stratification and inequality. An emerging strand of my recent work aims to bring techniques for the formal analysis of culture to the measurement of patterns of cultural choice, in terms of established cognitive linkages people make between conventional genre categories and folk social categories.
I have also contributed to various research streams at the intersection of Sociology, Physics, Computer Science and the study of complex systems more generally, all of which have come together under the banner of “Network Science” in the last two decades. This work deals primarily with the dynamics of social tie formation and decay, and with the influence of personal attributes and behaviors on tie formation and dissolution. Papers in this stream have appeared in high impact interdisciplinary journals and have been awarded funding by the National Science Foundation (2008-2012), the Army Research Laboratory (2013-2018), and the National Institutes of Health (2014-2018).
Degrees
University of Arizona (Tucson, AZ), Ph.D. in Sociology, 2006.
University of Arizona (Tucson, AZ), M.A. in Sociology, 2002.
Brooklyn College, City University of New York (Brooklyn, NY), B.S. in Psychology, 1997.
Publications
Omar Lizardo, Brandon Sepulvado, Dustin S. Stoltz, Marshall A. Taylor. 2020. “What can cognitive neuroscience do for cultural sociology?” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 8: 3-28
Omar Lizardo. 2019. “Specifying the ‘what’ and separating the ‘how’: Doings, sayings, codes, and artifacts as the building blocks of institutions.” Research in the Sociology of Organizations. 65(A): 217-234.
Jeff Larson and Omar Lizardo. 2019. “Institutional movement logics and the changing shape of the U.S. social movement field, 1960–1995.” Social Forces 97: 1389–1422.
Omar Lizardo. 2019. “Simmel’s dialectic of form and content in recent work in cultural sociology.” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 94:93-100.
Omar Lizardo. 2018. “The mutual specification of genres and audiences: Reflective two-mode centralities in person-to-culture choice data.” Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media and the Arts. 68: 52-71.
Bahulkar, Ashwin, Boleslaw K. Szymanski, Kevin Chan, and Omar Lizardo. 2018. “Impact of Attributes on Group Formation.” In IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), pp. 1250-1257. IEEE, 2018.
Omar Lizardo and Dustin S. Stoltz. 2018. “Max Weber’s ideal versus material interest distinction revisited.” European Journal of Social Theory. 21: 3–21.
Deliberate Trust and Intuitive Faith: A Dual‐Process Model of Reliance. Journal for the Theory Social Behaviour 48: 230– 250.
Michael Strand and Omar Lizardo. 2017. “The hysteresis effect: Theorizing the regularity of mismatch in action” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 47: 164–194.
Ashwin Bahulkar, Boleslaw K. Szymanski, Nitesh Chawla, Omar Lizardo and Kevin Chan. 2017. “Influence of personal preferences on link dynamics in social networks.” Complexity Article ID 4543563. doi:10.1155/2017/4543563.
Ashwin Bahulkar, Boleslaw K. Szymanski, Kevin Chan, and Omar Lizardo. “Coevolution of a multilayer node-aligned network whose layers represent different social relations.” Computational Social Networks 4,: 11.
Omar Lizardo. 2017. “Improving cultural analysis: Considering personal culture in its declarative and nondeclarative modes.” American Sociological Review 82: 88-115.
Omar Lizardo, Robert Mowry, Brandon Sepulvado, Dustin S. Stoltz, Marshall A. Taylor, Justin Van Ness and Michael Wood. 2016. “What are dual process models? Implications for cultural analysis in sociology.” Sociological Theory 34: 287-310.
Omar Lizardo. 2016. “Why ‘cultural matters’ matter: Culture talk as the mobilization of cultural capital in interaction.” Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media and the Arts 58: 1-17.
Michael Strand and Omar Lizardo. 2015. “Beyond world images: Belief as embodied action in the world.” Sociological Theory 33: 44-70.
Awards & Grants
Awards
(with Michael Strand), American Sociological Association Section on Theory Theory Prize for Outstanding Article for “Beyond world images: Belief as embodied action in the world” (Honorable Mention), 2017.
(with Jessica Collett), American Sociological Association Section on Emotions Recent Contribution Award for “Embarrassment and social organization: A multiple identities model” (Honorable Mention), 2015.
(with Robert Fishman), American Sociological Association Section on Comparative and Historical Sociology Charles Tilly Best Article Award for “‘How macro-historical change shapes cultural taste: Legacies of democratization in Spain and Portugal,” 2014.
(with Aaron Striegel, Shu Liu, Lei Meng, Christian Poelleabauer, and David Hachen) Best Paper Award at The Fifth ACM Hotplanet Workshop, Hong Kong 2013.
American Sociological Association Section on Theory Lewis Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda Setting, 2013.
American Sociological Association Section on Culture Clifford Geertz Prize for Best Article for “How cultural tastes shape personal networks,” 2008.
Grants
Principal Investigator, Network Science Collaborative Technology Alliance (NS-CTA), “Influencing, Agitation Propagation, and Social Contagion in Empirical Networks and Data-Driven Models.” United States Army Research Laboratory, $180,000 (2016-2018).
Principal Investigator, Network Science Collaborative Technology Alliance (NS-CTA), “Social Dynamics, Opinion Spreading, and Influencing in Social Networks.” United States Army Research Laboratory, $165,602 (2014-2016).
Investigator (with Nitesh Chawla [co-Investigator], David Hachen [co-Investigator], Tijana Milenković [co-Investigator], Jessica Payne [co-Investigator], Aaron Striegel [co-Investigator], and Christian Poellabauer [co-Investigator]), “NetHealth: Modeling the Co-evolution of Social Networks and Health Behaviors.” National Institutes of Health (R01 HL117757-01A1), $2,913,061 (2014-2018).
Principal Investigator (with David Hachen [Lead-PI], Jeffrey Liew [PI], and Aaron Striegel [PI]), “Using Smart Devices to Capture the Emotionality of Offline Communication.” National Academies Keck Futures Initiative Grant, $100,000 (2013-2014).
Principal Investigator, Network Science Collaborative Technology Alliance (NS-CTA), “Social Dynamics, Opinion Spreading, and Influencing in Social Networks.” United States Army Research Laboratory, $84,714 (2013-2014).
Principal Investigator (with Aaron Striegel [Lead-PI], David Hachen [PI], and Christian Poellabauer [PI] ), Division of Information & Intelligent Systems, Social-Computational Systems Program, Research Grant Award (#0968529): “SoCS: Explorations on the Effects of Pervasive Networking on Social Relationships and Resource Planning.” National Science Foundation, $748,825 (2010-2012).
Principal Investigator (with Zoltan Toroczkai [Lead-PI], Mark Alber PI], Nitesh Chawla [PI], and David Hachen [PI]), Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, Dynamics of Human Behavior Program, Research Grant Award (#0826958): “DHB: Longitudinal Analysis and Modeling of Large-Scale Social Networks Based on Cell Phone Records.” National Science Foundation, $749,271 (2008-2012).
