From its founding, the Brandeis University Sociology Department has been a distinguished small department with a distinct culture.  The department links the key normative questions of democracy, social justice, and the good life to the critical traditions of European and American social thought and Chicago School methods of rich ethnographic fieldwork in communities and institutions. The graduate program's goal has been to oblige students to formulate questions of social and analytical importance in "big picture" terms and submit these questions to the test of rigorous qualitative research.  Brandeis' graduate program strives to promote conceptual vitality, autonomous thinking, engagement with the empirical world, and critical analysis.  Brandeis' Sociology department boasts four pillars of expertise: Gender and Feminist Studies, Medical Sociology, Politics and Social Change, and Theory and Methods.  

The department particiaptes in several graduate joint degree programs.  These include recently developed joint PhD programs in Sociology and Social Policy with Brandeis' Heller School of Social Policy and Management, and in Sociology and Near Eastern and Judaic Studies.  Brandeis also has a Joint MA program with Women's and Gender Studies.