Aliza Luft

Aliza Luft is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research examines the fluctuating relationships between social identity, ideology, and interpersonal and socio-political action in contexts marked by war and violence. More broadly, she studies how people classify themselves and others, how these classification practices change and matter during wartime, and how they shape individual behavior and decision-making around violence. Using qualitative, historical, and experimental methods to develop falsifiable theories of violence, her work spans culture, politics, morality, identity, and conflict.

Her forthcoming book, Sacred Treason: Race, Religion, and the Holocaust in France, will be published by Harvard University Press. She is also the co-author, with Shai Dromi and Steve Hitlin, of the Second Handbook of the Sociology of Morality, recently published by Springer. Her research has appeared in American Sociological Review, Political Power & Social Theory, Qualitative Sociology, Sociological Theory, European Journal of Sociology, and other journals and edited volumes. In addition, she has published numerous op-eds and interviews in The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and elsewhere. Prior to joining UCLA, she worked in various capacities with USAID, the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate, the Montreal Institute for Genocide Studies, and Facing History & Ourselves.