is an Australian-American academic, sociologist, and professor of sociology. She is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Sociology and Director of Nexus Programmes at Mount Holyoke College (MHC). She has served as Associate Dean of Faculty and as the chair of the Sociology Department at MHC. She is a CCS Faculty Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. Townsley is the co-chair of the International Sociological Association RC16 Sociological Theory Research Committee and a program coordinator for the XXI ISA World Congress of Sociology 2027.
Townsley was named one of "The Best 300 Professors" by the The Princeton Review.
Townsley's academic interests and areas of research include Cultural sociology, Trope Theory, sociology of intellectuals and intellectualism, economic sociology, history of sociology, and Sociology of gender.
Biography Townsley, originally from Australia, completed their Bachelors in 1988 at the University of Queensland. She would later complete her master's degree and PhD (1996) at the University of California, Los Angeles.
She began working as a professor of sociology at MHC in 1996. She was named director of Nexus Programmes in 2013. She has also taught courses in gender studies. She has taught "Introduction to Sociology," among other sociology classes, every semester since she began teaching at MHC; she calls it one of her favorite classes that she teaches. Townsley also teaches classes in sociology of media, social thought, sociological fieldwork, sociology of algorithms, sociology of organisations, contemporary sociology, data analysis, and cultural sociology.
In 2005, Townsley was awarded the Mount Holyoke College Faculty Teaching Award. In 2025, she was awarded the Mount Holyoke College Award for Service.
As the director of Nexus – a pre-professional concentration and track, Townsley coordinates the annual LEAP Symposium, a conference for Nexus students and students receiving "Lynk" internship funding to present on summer internships, jobs, and projects. Townsley and Assistant Professor of Sociology Ben Gebre-Medhin began the "Multidisciplinarity, Measurement & Meaning METRICS Lab" in 2022.
Townsley has published 4 books and has had research published in journals in the United States, Germany, and Canada. Her book with Ronald N. Jacobs, Living Sociologically: Concepts and Connections is a required textbook in international sociology curriculums. Her 2003 journal article "On Irony: An Invitation to Neoclassical Sociology" was republished and featured as part of Thesis Eleven's "Thesis Eleven 40th Birthday: The Top 40" issue.
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