Non-Resident Scholar
West Virginia University
Curriculum Vitae
Publications
Katie E. Corcoran is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at West Virginia University. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Washington as well as an MA in Sociology and an MA in International Studies (Comparative Religion). After receiving her Ph.D., she served as a post-doctoral fellow at ISR for two years. Corcoran is a theoretical generalist who studies social groups and networks as links between macro- structures and micro- attitudes and behaviors. Her research applies these lenses to several empirical subfields—organizations, culture, crime/deviance, religion, emotion, inequality, and social movements. She is interested in exploring the processes by which individuals join and leave groups, invest time and resources in them, and come to hold their norms and values. In order to test theoretical predictions, she draws on individual-level, cross-organizational, regional, and national data and uses advanced quantitative as well as qualitative methodologies. In the subfield of religion, her work theorizes individual and organizational factors that contribute to the recruitment, commitment, and retention of members. In several studies, she investigates the positive effect of social networks and emotional experiences on religious participation and charitable donations. Moving beyond micro-level membership dynamics, she theorizes and tests organizational factors that increase a religious organization’s likelihood of recruiting and retaining highly committed members.
Corcoran has published articles in journals such as Social Science Research, Sociological Inquiry, Sociological Forum, the British Journal of Social Psychology, the Journal for the Scientific of Religion, and Rationality and Society and recently published the book Religious Hostility: A Global Assessment of Hatred and Terror with Rodney Stark. She is currently completing a book manuscript on cross-national crime and victimization with Rodney Stark entitled Criminal Victimization: A Global Assessment and is also writing a book on megachurches with James K. Wellman and Kate Stockly-Meyerdirk entitled High on God: How the Megachurch Conquered America.
