Rafael Narvaez


Rafael Narvaez earned his Ph.D. in sociology at the New School for Social Research in 2008, under Jeff Goldfarb, with a dissertation on the embodied aspects of collective memory. While at the New School, he also supervised a Harvard-based ethnography of gay venues in Manhattan (bars, clubs, sex clubs), as well as a Columbia-based study on racial, sexual, and gender identities. His interest in the embodied dimensions of collective memory aligned with data from these studies, and he began to study the ways in which collective discourses become embodied by people who hold gender, sexual, and racial identities—as well as how these discourses are disrupted and redesigned by the everyday embodied practices of social actors. These are the themes of his first book, under contract with University Press of America. He is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at McMurry University.