With research into courtship and new courses on sexualities and gender, Assistant Professor Sam Kendrick offers insights into culture.

Assistant Professor Sam Kendrick is making an immediate impact in the Department of Sociology through innovative teaching and groundbreaking research on gender, intimacy, and social change.

This academic year, Kendrick launched two new gender-focused courses—an undergraduate course on Sexualities and the department’s first graduate seminar on the Sociology of Gender. These courses fill a crucial gap in the curriculum, offering students at all levels new opportunities to critically engage with questions of gender, sexuality, and inequality. Both courses have been met with enthusiastic response from students, and Kendrick hopes to add them permanently to the department’s catalog.

Kendrick’s current book project, Love in the Time of COVID: The Pandemic’s Unsettling of Gendered Dating, explores how the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted US dating culture and reshaped gender power dynamics. 

Drawing on a longitudinal qualitative dataset of over 150 interviews with 103 participants conducted between 2020 and 2025, her work illuminates how crises can reconfigure norms of intimacy, masculinity, and femininity. Two manuscripts from this project are currently under review. One examines how the pandemic expanded women’s “strategies of empowered action” in dating, while the other explores how men navigated shifting norms—oscillating between patriarchal retrenchment and self-reflective transformation.

In addition to her book project, Kendrick co-authored a chapter with Professor Joane Nagel, “Gender, Climate Change, and the Production of Scientific Knowledge,” published in the Research Handbook on the Sociology of Knowledge (2025).

Through her teaching and research, Kendrick continues to expand the department’s engagement with critical gender studies, while offering students vital tools for understanding how culture, crisis, and inequality intersect in everyday life.