Damon Mayrl

Education

B.A., Yale University
M.A., Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley

Areas of Expertise

• Political sociology

• Sociology of religion

• Comparative and historical sociology

• Sociology of culture

• Sociological theory

• Social movements

• Law and society

• Public policy

Personal Information

Damon Mayrl joined the Colby faculty in 2017. He previously taught at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.

Mayrl's research uses comparative and historical methods to illuminate the interplay of culture, religion, politics, and public policy. His first book, Secular Conversions (Cambridge University Press, 2016), examines how political institutions contributed to religious change in American and Australian education from 1800 to the present. His current projects investigate how symbolic conflicts influence the form and visibility of the American state, how local actors understand the rapidly changing landscape of church-state law, and how historical methods are actually practiced in social scientific research.

Mayrl currently serves as Treasurer of the Social Science History Association, as Secretary/Treasurer for the American Sociological Association's Section on the Sociology of Religion, on Council for the Association for the Sociology of Religion, and on the editorial boards of Sociology of Religion and Civic Sociology. His research has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Sociological Theory, and other scholarly journals and edited volumes.

Publications

Mayrl, Damon. In press a. "The State and Soul of Intellectual Property Law." The American Sociologist.
Mayrl, Damon. In press b. "The Funk of White Souls: Toward a Du Boisian Theory of the White Church." Sociology of Religion.
Adler, Gary J., Jr., Damon Mayrl, Jonathan S. Coley, Rebecca Sager, and Eric Plutzer. 2022. "Religion-State Interaction at the Local Level: Key Findings from a Survey of Religion and Local Elected Officials." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 61(1): 217-29.
Adler, Gary J., Jr., Selena E. Ortiz, Eric Plutzer, Damon Mayrl, Jonathan S. Coley, and Rebecca Sager. 2021. "Religion at the Frontline: How Religion Influenced the Response of Local Government Officials to the COVID-19 Pandemic." Sociology of Religion 82(4): 397-425 .
Mayrl, Damon, and Dahlia Venny '22. 2021. "The Dejudicialization of Religious Freedom?" Social Compass 68(3): 342-58.
Wilson, Nicholas Hoover, and Damon Mayrl. 2021. "Visualizing the Expanding Space of Consecration in American Sociology, 1980-2020." Socius 7.
Fernandez, Juan J., Antonio M. Jaime-Castillo, Damon Mayrl, and Celia Valiente. 2021. "Societal Religiosity and the Gender Gap in Political Interest, 1990-2014." British Journal of Sociology 72: 252-69.
Mayrl, Damon, and Nicholas Hoover Wilson. 2020a. "What Do Historical Sociologists Do All Day? Analytic Architectures in Historical Sociology." American Journal of Sociology 120(5): 1345-94.
Mayrl, Damon, and Nicholas Hoover Wilson. 2020b. "The Archive as a Social World." Qualitative Sociology 43: 407-26.
Astor, Avi, and Damon Mayrl. 2020. "Culturalized Religion: A Synthetic Review and Agenda for Future Research." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 59(2): 209-26.
For additional publications and further information, please visit his personal website.