Rebekah Burroway

Rebekah Burroway is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Sociology at Stony Brook University. She holds a Ph.D. from Duke University (2011). Her research focuses on the sociology of beauty, women's empowerment, gender inequality, and global development. Dr. Burroway employs both ethnographic methods (e.g., studying beauty standards through makeup artists' practices) and quantitative approaches (e.g., cross-national analyses of health and inequality). Her work challenges conventional development narratives by emphasizing women's empowerment as a critical driver of health outcomes in low- and middle-income countries.

Her research highlights the societal costs of beauty practices—both financial (e.g., global beauty industry exceeding $600 billion) and temporal—and explores their dual impacts on self-expression and mental health. Quantitatively, she investigates how women’s education, property rights, and employment correlate with child health, food security, and environmental outcomes. Notable projects include analyzing the relationship between mobile phone access and HIV prevention, and the intersection of gender rights with forest conservation.

Awards and grants are not explicitly listed, but her publications reflect sustained engagement with global sociology and development studies. She advises graduate students in sociology and oversees the graduate program as Director of Graduate Studies. Her work bridges micro-level ethnographic insights with macro-level structural analysis, offering interdisciplinary contributions to gender studies and public health.