Biography

Joshua Silver is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Chicago and a Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He serves as Book Review Editor for the American Journal of Sociology. Joshua specializes in urban and environmental sociology, political economy, science & technology studies, and social theory. He is currently conducting an ethnographic study of the energy industry in transition in Houston and the Gulf Coast. He is a fifth-generation Houstonian.

Joshua has an M.A. in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in International Relations from Tufts University. His recent publications explore topics such as the history of ecological thinking in sociology, the knowledge practices of academic editors, and the politics of financial assistance for small businesses during the pandemic. In addition to his scholarly work, Joshua is completing his first feature-length documentary film, Laurentian, a visual ethnography of communities tied together by the changing fisheries ecosystem of the Great Lakes.

Selected Publications

Joshua Silver. “The Ecological Sociology of Radhakamal Mukerjee,” forthcoming in Julian Go and Anaheed Al-Hardan, eds. Anticolonialism and Social Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Joshua Silver and Claudio Benzecry. 2022. “Editor’s Love: Matching, Reading, and the Editorial Self-Concept.” In Angelica Thumala Olave, ed. The Cultural Sociology of Reading. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

William A. Birdthistle and Joshua Silver. 2021. “Funding Crises: An Empirical Study of the Paycheck Protection Program.”  Buffalo Law Review.