Shyon Baumann

Professor Baumann is chair and associate professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. His main area of expertise is the sociological study of the media, culture, and the arts. Professor Baumann received a B.A. in sociology from McGill University in 1994 and a Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University in 2001. He lectured in sociology at Harvard for one year before joining the sociology department at the University of Toronto in 2002. He regularly teaches undergraduate courses on the mass media, with an emphasis on media controversies, marketing, and recent developments in theory and evidence regarding media effects. At the graduate level, he has taught a seminar on the sociology of culture and has co-taught the department's required Doctoral Research Practicum, a second-year PhD course that helps students develop their own research projects for publication. His research centres on the key concepts of evaluation, legitimacy, status, cultural schemas, and inequality. He also continues to work, with Josée Johnston, on the sociology of food. Within the last five years, they have published a book with Routledge called Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape, a paper in Gender & Society, and several book chapters. Currently, they are together revising Foodies for a second edition. Other work in this area includes a paper on the motivations for organic, local, and farmers’ market food consumption (currently under review), and an analysis of the food choices of people with especially low economic and cultural capital.
Click here for a list of recent publications.