Kerice Doten-Snitker

Kerice Doten-Snitker is an interdisciplinary social scientist who integrates sociology, political science, economics, and history. Her research investigates how social boundaries intertwine with political development and institutional change to facilitate opportunities for exclusion and violence. She explores what and whose interests and values are at stake in conflicts over the “right” allocation of rights and rewards in a society. Across her work, she pursues three lines of inquiry: how interests and values are institutionalized, what catalyzes institutional change, and how this change happens. Primarily, she uses quantitative, geospatial, and historical methods to study the social construction of race and ethnicity through institutions and how this links with ongoing processes of state formation.

She has studied expulsions of Jewish communities from medieval German cities, arguing that that expulsion, and exclusion more generally, is an outcome of majority group factions negotiating over authority and effective governance. She is continuing to work on premodern Europe, antisemitism, and governance. Her research brings overdue attention to ethnoreligious difference in the social science of premodern Europe plus reevaluates assumptions about the economic role and position of medieval Jews. The rest of her work takes up social and institutional change more broadly, through investigating the contexts and processes that promote change in both contemporary and historical settings. Other topics have included the European witch craze and curricular and cultural change in STEM academic units.

Kerice holds a BA in Sociocultural Studies from Bethel University, Minnesota, and a MA and PhD in Sociology from the University of Washington.