Claudio E. Benzecry

I am a cultural sociologist and ethnographer, motivated by theoretical questions, interpretive challenges and a passion for teaching sociology. My research is designed to develop fine-grained local analyses that provide micro foundations to the sociological study of larger comparative themes such as the emotional attachment to interpretative meanings and complex forms; the relationship between class, status and morality; the production of cultural and artistic value; and the coupling of the macro and the micro dimensions of practice. I’ve published on digital media and cultural production, intellectual sociability and literary value and the micro-macro link when analyzing art worlds and cultural consumption. My research sites include Argentina and the US.

I'm currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of Connecticut. I came to U Conn in September of 2007, after having completed my Ph D at New York University. I'm originally from Argentina and have lived in Paris, Houston, Montevideo and Buenos Aires, where I went to high school and college.

In order to write The Opera Fanatic I did three years of fieldwork, conducted archival research and 44 in depth interviews, aiming to make more complex the relationship between taste and the attainment of social status. Honor in this case is not related to how much recognition fans can gather from peers outside of the opera house or in how much they can convert their lifestyle in resources like money, connections or job, but rather with how they craft themselves as honorable people. Passionate fans produce themselves as worthy selves, through a laborious, sustained long-term engagement with opera. Fans conceive of opera as a meaningful activity that offers them a stage on which to enact certain values, feel in public and express themselves as superior and highly refined selves among equals.