advancing the study of unidentified anomalous phenomena through interdisciplinary dialogue
November Colloquium: Jack LaViolette
Fri, Nov 13
|Google Meet
Dr. Jack LaViolette will speak at the Society's November Colloquium. His lecture examines how rural landscapes, everyday activities, and sensory attention shape UFO sightings, exploring why some places produce far more reports than others.
Time & Location
Nov 13, 2026, 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM EST
Google Meet
Guests
About the event
Jack LaViolette, Ph.D., joins the Society for a colloquium exploring how place, everyday activity, and sensory attention shape firsthand UFO experiences. Drawing on 21,000 sightings reported from nonmetropolitan counties between 2000 and 2020, his lecture examines why some places produce far more UFO reports than others and how the social and material organization of those places may help explain the difference.
Dr. LaViolette is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan and a Junior Fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows. His research brings together cultural sociology, computational social science, and the sociology of knowledge, using large-scale textual and historical data to study how ideas, sensibilities, and cultural forms take shape and spread across fields, institutions, and places. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University in 2026 and holds an MSc from the Oxford Internet Institute and a BA in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania.
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