Jaime Kucinskas is Associate Professor of the Department of Sociology at Hamilton College and Visiting Professor at Mid Sweden University for the 2024-2025 academic year. She is an award-winning teacher and researcher fascinated by how people strive to be moral citizens. In our world dominated by organizational power and influence, she examines how people respond to wicked collective problems within, through, and/or outside of the different institutions in which they live their lives.
In her most recent book, The Loyalty Trap (Columbia University Press), she shares how career federal civil servants responded to the Trump administration amid a leadership turn toward autocracy. Her first paper from this research, with Yvonne Zylan, explains the moral tightrope federal civil servants walked in the American Journal of Sociology.
Kucinskas is also the author of the The Mindful Elite, which explains how Buddhist modernist meditators transformed meditation in America to be embraced by esteemed secular organizations such as Fortune 500 companies, Ivy League schools, hospitals, the U.S. military, and K-12 schools. Through insider access and social skill, these contemplative entrepreneurs have legitimized and popularized meditation for millions of professionals and secular people.
In other research with Hamilton College Environmental Science Prof. Aaron Strong, Kucinskas is comparing rural responses to climate change across central New York, Jämtland, Sweden and Canterbury Region, New Zealand through 2030 as each region seeks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Kucinskas’ insights have contributed to reporting and been published in various media outlets, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Government Executive, Wired, Fast Company, and The Atlantic, as well as dozens of newspapers around the United States and radio broadcasts around the world.