Academic interests: ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, philosophy of social science, human rights, responsibility of intellectuals

Peter Eglin has taught sociology at Laurier since 1976. He currently teaches courses in Ethnomethodology, Human Rights and Sociology of Crime. He was Humboldt Research Fellow at the Universität Konstanz 1980-1981, and Visiting Research Associate at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at Wolfson College, Oxford in 1981. As a visiting professor he has taught at the University of Toronto, Newcastle-upon-Tyne Polytechnic and the University of Wales at Bangor. He is author of Talk and Taxonomy: A Methodological Comparison of Ethnosemantics and Ethnomethodology (John Benjamins, 1980).  With Stephen Hester he is co-author of The Montreal Massacre: A Story of Membership Categorization Analysis (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2003), A Sociology of Crime (Routledge, 1992), and co-editor of Culture in Action: Studies in Membership Categorization Analysis (University Press of America, 1997). As a student of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis he investigates the use of categories for describing persons in practical reasoning in talk and texts in various settings, including work on gender categories and the category "feminist." He is currently studying university-specific work as an interactional accomplishment (see "What do we do Wednesday?" Canadian Review of Sociology, 2009).

He is also exercised by the question of intellectuals’ responsibility in a number of human rights issues, notably state terrorism in El Salvador (in Jeff Klaehn’s Filtering the News (2005)), near-genocide in East Timor (in Jeff Klaehn’s Bound By Power (2006)), the Montreal Massacre (in Jeff Klaehn’s Roadblocks to Equality (2009)) and Israeli crimes in Palestine. He has recently completed a book manuscript entitled Intellectual citizenship and the problem of incarnation, and is working on a study of the Israel lobby in Canada, particularly on university campuses.