new article/old gratitude

For academic administrators like me, it is pretty easy to lapse into research hibernation. My own research progress has been slower than maple surple since becoming chair, but I do my best to keep a few articles oozing through the pipeline. One new piece with Mike Massoglia is just out in American Journal of Sociology today -- Settling Down and Aging Out: Toward an Interactionist Theory of Desistance and the Transition to Adulthood.

I was revising the syllabus on my criminology seminar when I first saw it in print, which took me back to a crim seminar with my advisor in my first year of graduate school. I vividly recall my first encounter with a draft of his spine-crushingly cool AJS article on symbolic interactionism and delinquency. Though I didn't know much sociology at the time, I could appreciate its beautiful marriage of theory and research design. And while I haven't followed Ross Matsueda's ginormous footsteps as a social psychologist, he always gave me strong and steadfast support, the freedom to pursue my own vision, and an exemplary model to follow.

Over the years, I've come to appreciate the rarity of this sort of advisor/advisee relationship -- and my own good fortune in having an advisor who was more interested in pushing me intellectually than in replicating himself. The new piece, written with one of my own advisees, is close to my heart because it touches on a few ideas he shared with me in those first heady days of graduate school.