Staff profile

I joined the Department of Sociology at Durham in September 2026, where I am a member of the Higher Education and Social Inequalities research group. Before coming to Durham, I studied History at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and Sociology at the London School of Economics, and I taught at several British and French universities. I remain a Visiting Fellow in Sociology at LSE.

My research examines how higher education produces inequalities, and how those inequalities are lived and understood by students themselves. I work with both quantitative and qualitative methods, in a tradition shaped by the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. My doctoral thesis examined undergraduate students at an elite French university, tracing who gains access to this prestigious institution, who succeeds within it, and how students come to see themselves and others as deserving or not.

At Durham I co-teach Critical Scholarship in the Social Sciences (year 1), Research Methods (year 1) and Modern and Contemporary Social Theory (year 2). My pedagogy is explicit and relational: I aim to make the expectations of university study visible rather than assuming students already share them, and to build the kind of relationships in which students feel comfortable asking for help. I have been fortunate to have this approach recognised with three teaching awards at LSE.

I welcome enquiries about supervision from students wishing to write an undergraduate or postgraduate dissertation on education and inequality.

Research Interests

• Inequalities
• Education
• Elites
• Mixed methods

Journal Article

• Nudge or not, university teachers have mixed feelings about online teaching
  
  Banerjee, S., Jambrina-Canseco, B., Brundu-Gonzalez, B., Gordon, C., & Carr, J. (2023). Nudge or not, university teachers have mixed feelings about online teaching. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 10(1), Article 232. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-01691-1