About

Curriculum Vitae (1 May 2023, PDF document)

PUBLICITY PHOTOS

BRIEF BIOGRAPHY

David Yamane is Professor of Sociology at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. For the first 20 years of his academic career, he specialized in the sociology of religion, a field in which he authored, co-authored, or edited 6 books and 2 major scholarly journals. Since 2011, Professor Yamane has studied guns, especially the new self-defense oriented core of American gun culture that Michael Bane calls Gun Culture 2.0. Among his publications in this area is a short history of concealed carry in the U.S., Concealed Carry Revolution: Liberalizing the Right to Bear Arms in America, a review essay on “The Sociology of US Gun Culture,” and most recently, “Understanding and Misunderstanding American Gun Culture and Violence.”

As he continues to work on a book combining his personal experiences and sociological observations of Gun Culture 2.0, Professor Yamane shares his thoughts on two blogs, gunculture2point0.com and guncurious.com, and on Twitter at @davidyamane and @gunculture2pt0. In 2022, he launched a YouTube channel, “Light Over Heat with Professor David Yamane,” on which he posts weekly short videos about issues related to his scholarship.

FULL BIOGRAPHY

David Yamane is Professor of Sociology at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Prior to joining the Wake Forest faculty in January 2005, Yamane was an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame (1998-2004) and a post-doctoral fellow at the Center on Religion and Democracy at the University of Virginia (2002-2003). Raised in Half Moon Bay, California, he earned his bachelor’s degree in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley (1991), and his M.S. (1994) and Ph.D. (1998) in sociology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

His first book, Student Movements for Multiculturalism: Challenging the Curricular Color Line in Higher Education (2001), compared the development and implementation of ethnic studies requirements at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and University of California at Berkeley. It was based on his Senior Thesis. The research for the project was supervised by Michael Olneck (Wisconsin) and Jerome Karabel (UC-Berkeley), and supported by a Minority Opportunity Summer Training (MOST) Program Summer Fellowship from the American Sociological Association.

For the first 20 years of his academic career, Yamane specialized in the sociology of religion, a field in which he authored, co-authored, or edited 4 books on Roman Catholicism. These include Becoming Catholic: Finding Rome in the American Religious Landscape (2014) and The Catholic Church in State Politics: Negotiating Prophetic Demands and Political Realities (2005).

Following his mentors Robert N. Bellah and Richard A. Schoenherr, Yamane’s two most frequently cited articles address issues of secularization and religious experience. “Secularization on Trial: In Defense of a Neosecularization Paradigm” (1997) lays out a framework for understanding the transformation rather than decline of religion in modern society. “Narrative and Religious Experience” (2000) argues that sociologists should take the experiential dimension of religion seriously, but also recognize its unique ontology and adopt an approach to studying how religious experience is made meaningful through narrative.

While still an assistant professor, Yamane was appointed Editor of Sociology of Religion: A Quarterly Review, the official journal of the Association for the Sociology of Religion. During his four years as editor (2007-2010), he reduced the journal’s time-to-decision, increased its impact factor, and oversaw its transition from being self-published to being published by the Journals Division of Oxford University Press. He later served as Associate Editor of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (2012-2015).

Reflecting his interest in pedagogy and the scholarship of teaching and learning, Yamane joined Keith A. Roberts (1947-2018) as co-author of the best-selling textbook, Religion in Sociological Perspective, from the 5^th edition forward. A new edition of the textbook, the first since Roberts’s passing in 2018, was published in 2020.

In a departure from his previous work, Yamane became a student of guns and gun culture in 2011. He is particularly interested in the new self-defense oriented core of American gun culture that he calls (following gun writer Michael Bane) “Gun Culture 2.0.” He recently published a short book on this history of concealed carry in the U.S., Concealed Carry Revolution: Liberaliz ing the Right to Bear Arms in America.

In a review essay on “The Sociology of US Gun Culture” (2017), Yamane observes that despite the existence of a robust culture centered on the legal ownership and use of guns by law‐abiding gun owners in the United States, there is no sociology of U.S. gun culture. Rather, the social scientific study of guns is dominated by criminological and epidemiological studies of gun violence. As a corrective to this oversight, Yamane outlines what a proper sociology of U.S. gun culture should look like.

An elaboration of his thinking on “Gun Culture 2.0: Evolution and Contours of Defensive Gun Ownership in America” is forthcoming in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. He recently consulted with the Lutheran Ethicist Network and published “Understanding and Misunderstanding American Gun Culture and Violence” in the Journal of Lutheran Ethics.

Outside his teaching and writing, Yamane is a United States Racquet Stringers Association “Master Racquet Technician” and has strung rackets at two Grand Slams (the U.S. and French Opens), other men’s and women’s professional events, college championships, and national junior tournaments. For 10 years (2008-2018) he was the head racket technician for the 2018 NCAA National Champion Wake Forest men’s tennis team, and in 2014 he was named Tennis Industry Magazine’s “Stringer of the Year.”

Beyond working, Yamane enjoys playing tennis, eating, drinking whisk(e)y, watching live theater and dance, and target shooting. He lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina with his wife, Sandy. Between them they have four children and two grandchildren.

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