Jared Del Rosso

Associate Professor
Sturm Hall 428
Phone: 303-871-2773
Email: Jared.DelRosso@du.edu
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Areas of Expertise/Research Interests

Sociology of Knowledge, Cultural Sociology, Human Rights, State Violence, Denial, Textual Analysis

Professional biography

Jared Del Rosso is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology. His research examines the recent debates in the U.S. about detainee abuse, torture, and interrogation policy. He is especially interested in understanding how political communities assign meaning to their own acts of violence and the suffering that it causes. His book on these issues, Talking About Torture: How Political Discourse Shapes the Debate , was published in June 2015 by Columbia University Press. Del Rosso has also published several articles, reviews, and op-eds on torture in Social Forces, Social Problems, Sociological Forum, Contemporary Sociology, and the Huffington Post, among others.

Before joining the University of Denver in 2012, Del Rosso was a joint-lecturer in the Department of Sociology and the Justice Studies Program at the University of New Hampshire, where he taught courses in qualitative methods, crime, and conflict. Prior to that, he served as a graduate teaching fellow at Boston College. There, Del Rosso designed a course on torture, which he taught as an elective for the Department of Sociology at BC and for the Experimental College at Tufts University. He has further developed this course into a First-Year Seminar, “Torture in the Modern World,” for the University of Denver.

education

PhD   Sociology, Boston College
MA    Sociology, Boston College
BA     Sociology, Brandeis University

selected publications

Del Rosso, Jared. 2015. Talking About Torture: How Political Discourse Shapes the Debate.  New York: Columbia University Press.

Del Rosso, Jared. 2014. "The Toxicity of Torture: The Cultural Structure of U.S. Political Discourse of Waterboarding." Social Forces 93(1): 383-404.

Del Rosso, Jared. 2014. "Textuality and the Social Organization of Denial: Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, and the Meanings of U.S. Interrogation Policies." Sociological Forum 29(1): 52-74.

Del Rosso, Jared. 2014. "What’s Left for America’s Torture Apologists." Huffington Post , December 14.

Del Rosso, Jared. 2011. "The Textual Mediation of Official Denial: Congress, Abu Ghraib, and the Construction of an Isolated Incident." Social Problems 58(2):165–88.