Neal Caren

Neal Caren is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on social movements, computational social science, and media analysis. He co-authored the book Rough Draft of History: A Century of US Social Movements in the News (2022), examining media coverage of movements. Caren directs undergraduate programs in Sociology and Management and Societies, teaches courses on computational methods, and serves as editor of the journal Mobilization.

Education: PhD in Sociology (2005), MA in Sociology (2001), and BA in Sociology (1995) from New York University and Columbia University, respectively.

Research Interests:

• Contemporary US social movements
• Media data analysis
• Protest dynamics and electoral impact
• Historical media representation of movements
• Computational methods for text analysis

Recent Publications: Focus on BLM protests' electoral effects, media coverage drivers, and historical movement analysis. His work appears in American Sociological Review, Social Forces, and Annual Review of Sociology.

Teaching: Courses include computational data collection, sociological perspectives, and social justice simulations. Graduate courses emphasize Python for text analysis.