Professor Connor “Noor” Strobel is a Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows and Collegiate Assistant Professor in the College at the University of Chicago. A sociologist by training, his research is generally interested in contested identities --- how our identities become sources of personal and group conflict, and how those contestations are resolved.
He is an internationally recognized expert on the social dynamics of eating disorders and has written widely on other topics including the politics of deviance, debates within Islamic feminism, and the rules of speech on social media platforms. Professor Strobel’s first co-authored book titled The Politics of “Perverts”: The Political Attitudes and Actions of Non-traditional Sexual Minorities is forthcoming with NYU Press.
Professor Strobel is currently working on two projects concerned with the latent effects of ambiguity in the law during periods of pronounced technological and cultural changes. The first project is a comparative study of how families with neurodivergent K-12 students navigate educational, legal, medical, and other institutions amidst rapidly changing legal regimes, forms of expertise, and cultural changes about neurodivergence. The second project is about the unforeseen consequences of how the law’s failure to modernize to recent changes in technology has led to unprecedented challenges to legal and social notions of obscenity.
His work has been published or is forthcoming in venues such as Gender Issues, Sociology Compass, Oxford University Press, Routledge, and Palgrave-MacMillan. Professor Strobel’s research and student advocacy have been covered by media outlets such as the LA Times, PBS Newshour, San Francisco Chronicle, Faculti, and the Eating Disorder Association of Ireland.