Solon Simmons is an assistant professor at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University. He teaches courses on advanced quantitative methods, social theory and on the variously competing and complementary roles of class and culture, ideology and identity in politics and conflicts both domestically and around the world.

He has published widely on a variety of topics from popular stories in American elections, to the role of outsider presidential candidates, to the structural sources of inequality. His current projects include:(1) a study of values talk and popular narrative in the Congressional election of 2006; (2) a broad examination of the discursive fault lines of American politics over the past half-century, which suggests that class thematic reasoning is more stable and salient than many suppose and that Democratic leaders are less in touch with their animating story than are Republicans; (2) A multi-pronged investigation of the politics of higher education that draws on information from two national probability samples, one of professors and one of the general population. Results from this new study have already appeared in many national news outlets including the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Washington Post and were the focus of a panel for the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) conference “The Public Image and the Private Reality of Faculty.”  

Solon has also augmented his disciplinary work from time to time with excursions into the broader intellectual community with semi-scholarly contributions to outlets like Salon.com among others.

Courses

CONF 695 - Class and Culture Wars

Selected Publications

Book Chapters

Neil Gross and Solon J. Simmons. 2006. “How Religious are America’s College and University Professors” in Douglas Jacobsen (ed) The Post Secular University Oxford, Oxford University Press

Hauser, Robert M., Solon J. Simmons, and Devah I. Pager. 2004. “High School Dropout, Race-Ethnicity, and Social Background from the 1970s to the 1990s” in Gary Orfield (ed) Dropouts in America: Confronting the Graduation Rate Crisis, Cambridge, MA. Harvard Education Press. Also available as CDE Working Paper 2000-12, Center for Demography and Ecology, The University of Wisconsin – Madison)

Hauser, Robert M., Devah I. Pager, and Solon J. Simmons. 2004. “Race-Ethnicity, Social Background and Grade Retention.” In Herbert J. Walberg (ed) Can Unlike Students Learn Together? Grade Retention, Tracking, and Grouping (Research in Educational Productivity), Greenwich, CT. Information Age Publishing Inc. Also available as CDE Working Paper 2000-08, Center for Demography and Ecology, The University of Wisconsin – Madison)

Journal Articles Published or in Press

Simmons, Solon. 2006. (Revise and Resubmit) “The Surprising Life of Class Politics: Salient Justifications in Models of Presidential Voting 1952-2004” American Journal of Sociology.

Simmons, Solon J and James R. Simmons. 2006. (Forthcoming). “If it Weren’t for Those ?*!&*@!* Nader Voters We Wouldn’t be in this Mess: The Social Determinants of the Nader Vote and the Constraints on Political Choice” New Political Science Vol.28, No2.

Simmons, James R. and Solon J. Simmons. 2004. “Structural Conflict in Contemporary Cities.”American Review of Public Administration, Vol. 34, 374-388.

Gross, Neil and Solon Simmons. 2002. “Intimacy as a Double Edged Phenomenon: An Empirical Test of Giddens.”Social Forces, Vol. 81, No. 2. (Dec.), pp. 531-555