Social Sciences Division

College of Arts & Sciences Dean Stacey explains that there is an important civic, political, social, and cultural element to an education and that you can get that in a wide variety of majors.

Interested in the College of Arts & Sciences but don’t know what to study? Here are six majors that you may not have discovered yet.

Glennys Young, professor of history and of international studies and chair of the Department of History, was featured in a Spanish TV documentary about Cold War-era interrogation program, and the new Burke Museum was honored.

Last year, Amazon surpassed Boeing as the state’s largest private employer, usurping a title the airplane manufacturer had likely held since the post-World War II era. The UW’s Margaret O’Mara, professor of history; Jeff Shulman, professor of marketing; and Andrew Hedden, associate director of the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies, are quoted.

“Humanities Washington convened an interesting and provocative online discussion about controversial public monuments and ways we might think about whether they remain as is, whether they should be reinterpreted given today’s understanding or whether there are cases in which they should be moved to private settings,” writes Rufus Woods, publisher emeritus of The Wenatchee World. Josh Reid, associate professor of American Indian studies at the UW, is quoted.

Department of Statistics faculty are featured in this article about their COVID-19 research.

The National Archives building in Seattle is slated for sale, a move that could deprive Indigenous people in the Pacific Northwest of access to critical documents. Josh Reid, associate professor of American Indian studies at the UW, is quoted.

Twenty moments from a year like no other — captured through the lenses of UW photographers.

Through hours of Zoom meetings, University of Washington vice provost and dean of Undergraduate Academic Affairs Ed Taylor found himself nervously folding paper off screen. As he helped the university make high-stakes decisions about its pandemic future, his fingers kept busy shaping origami cranes. Taylor's collection of about 300 cranes tells the story of how he coped with this year, and they will constitute his entry to a virtual time capsule, the culmination of a class he led called "2020: The Course." Taylor; Kate Starbird, UW associate professor of human centered design and engineering; Theodore Myhre, UW assistant teaching professor of law; and Iisaaksiichaa Ross Braine, the UW’s tribal liaison, are quoted. Hilary Godwin, dean of the UW School of Public Health; Dr. Benjamin Danielson, UW clinical professor of pediatrics; Robert Stacey, dean of the UW College of Arts and Sciences; Alexes Harris, UW professor of sociology; Carolyn West, professor of social, behavioral and human sciences at UW Tacoma; and Megan Ming Francis, UW associate professor of political science, are mentioned.

An article by Margaret O’Mara, professor of history, is featured in this collection of New York Times articles.

Margaret O’Mara, professor of history, explains the rise of inequality this year.

Taso Lagos of the Jackson School of International Studies has written a new book published in November, entitled “Charisma and Religious War in America: Ministries and Rivalries of Sister Aimee and ‘Fighting Bob.'”

Even as shared public spaces emptied out, the gap between the economically privileged and the precarious became impossible to ignore. Margaret O’Mara, professor of history at the UW, is quoted.

“Silicon Valley’s obituary has been written prematurely before; boom-and-bust cycles have defined the region’s economy for decades,” writes Margaret O’Mara, professor of history at the UW.

“For [Milton] Friedman, managers are agents who work on behalf of owners: their principals. Because all shareholders want to maximize their return on investments, the Friedman logic goes that managers have a duty to focus solely on profit maximization. Should, then, managers support climate actions in response to stakeholders’ pressure?” write Nives Dolšak, professor of marine and environmental affairs at the UW; Aseem Prakash, professor of political science at the UW; and Jennifer Griffin of Loyola University Chicago.