Mark Hoffman

Mark Hoffman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and the Graduate School of Business (by courtesy) at Stanford University. His research lies at the intersection of social network analysis, social history, and computational social science. His current projects include a large-scale study of the civility of public Facebook conversations in the lead up to the 2016 election, a social-technical analysis of the emergence and diffusion of mathematics through European intellectual networks in the 18th century, and a study of how new styles and subgenres of the novel emerged through the co-evolution of reading and writing habits of American authors at the beginning of the 20th century. Linking these different projects is an interest in the historical and relational processes that shape intellectual and cultural consumption and production.

Hoffman's work has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Poetics, and Sociological Science. His paper, "The Materiality of Ideology: Cultural Consumption and Political Thought after the American Revolution", won the 2021 Roger V. Gould Prize. He received the Best Dissertation Award from Columbia University's Department of Sociology in 2020.

Hoffman completed his Ph.D. in Sociology at Columbia University and received his B.A. in Social Research and Public Policy from NYU Abu Dhabi.

Publications

• Hoffman, Mark A. 2018. “The Materiality of Ideology: Cultural Consumption and Political Thought after the American Revolution.” Conditionally accepted at the American Journal of Sociology.

• Zerubavel, Noam, Mark A. Hoffman, Adam D. Reich, Kevin N. Ochsner, and Peter Bearman. 2018. “Neural precursors of future liking and affective reciprocity.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

• Hoffman, M. A., Cointet, J. P., Brandt, P., Key, N., & Bearman, P. (2017). "The (Protestant) Bible, the (printed) sermon, and the word (s): The semantic structure of the Conformist and Dissenting Bible, 1660–1780." Poetics.

• Hoffman, M. A., & Bearman, P. S. (2015). "Bringing anomie back in: exceptional events and excess suicide." Sociological Science, 2, 186-210.