BA, MA, PhD, The American University
Walter F. Carroll is Professor of Sociology and a faculty member in Asian Studies. He received his PhD in Sociology from American University, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow. Before coming to Bridgewater State University in 1986, Dr. Carroll taught at the University of Bridgeport, Simmons College, Tufts University, and Goucher College. He is an urban sociologist and a sociologist of food. He has studied and written about guns and gun violence in the United States and, more recently, has concentrated on issues related to the sociology of food. He wrote Brockton: From Rural Parish to Urban Center (1989), co-authored Social Problems: Causes, Consequences, and Interventions (2000), and has recently written pieces on the globalization of American food, hunger as a continuing problem in the United States, and the ethical aspects of Asian cuisine. He has studied and taught about sushi and globalization. He received the New England Sociological Association's Apple Award for Outstanding Contributions to Teaching Sociology in 1992. In 2001, he received a Commonwealth Information Technology Initiative (CITI) IT Across the Curriculum grant for work on Communications, Technology, and Society. At BSU, in 2007 he (with three colleagues) received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Collaboration to Improve Teaching at BSU for infusing Japanese studies into the curriculum. In 2014 he received the Jordan D. Fiore Award for Social Justice to support his research on "Organizations Advocating Gun Control," published in Guns and Contemporary Society (2016).