Alison Bianchi and graduate student Donna Lancianese won the 2009 ASA Sociology of Emotions Section's Recent Contribution Award for their paper "Accentuate the Positive: Positive Sentiments and Status in Task Groups" Social Psychology Quarterly 70: 7-26.

Mary Campbell has received a 2010 Collegiate Teaching Award. Mary is a leader in the department in incorporating service learning into her undergraduate coursework and has received grants to develop courses that engage students in critical thinking.

Jae-On Kim received the 2009 George H. Hallett Award, presented by The Representation and Electoral Systems Section of the American Political Science Association, for his book, Participation and Political Equality: A Seven Nation Comparison. This annual award is given to authors of books that have made lasting contributions to the literature on representation and electoral systems.

Kevin Leicht and Scott Fitzgerald (UI Ph.D., 2003) won the 2009 Midwest Sociological Society Best Book Award for their book, Post-Industrial Peasants: the Illusion of Middle Class Prosperity.

Michael Lovaglia and graduate students Christopher Kelley and Shane Soboroff were awarded the Gamma Chapter Foundation award for "Promoting Achievement" for their work creating the Terra Hawk Leadership Group.

Michael Lovaglia, graduate students Christopher Kelley and Shane Soboroff, and UI PhDs Christabel Rogalin and Jeff Lucas contributed a chapter on "Humor and the Effectiveness of Diverse Leaders" to the book Social Structure and Emotion, which received the Recent Contribution to the Literature Book Award from the ASA's Sociology of Emotions section.

Michael Sauder has recently been selected to be a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Fellow in Health Policy Research at Harvard University. Also, his article (co-authored with Wendy Espeland), "Reactivity and Rankings: How Public Measures Recreate Social Worlds," which was published in the American Journal of Sociology, has won the 2009 Clifford Geertz Prize for Best Article, awarded by ASA Section on the Sociology of Culture, and the Philip D. Shelton Prize for Outstanding Legal Education Research, awarded by the Law School Admission Council.