Matthew Coetzee University of Notre Dame, IN, USA

Matthew Coetzee is a cultural sociologist and PhD candidate in Sociology, with a minor in Screen Cultures, at the University of Notre Dame. For the 2025–2026 academic year, I am honored to be a Harry Frank Guggenheim Emerging Scholar. At Notre Dame, he hold appointments as a Wilsey Distinguished Graduate Fellow at the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, a Kellogg Institute Fellow for the Study of Democracy and Development, and a Sorin Fellow at the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. Beyond Notre Dame, he is also a Yale Predoctoral Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology.
His research asks how moral solidarity evolves over time and how diverse communities rebuild connection after injustice. His book project examines how communities respond to rupture—whether they fracture or mobilize toward repair. He focus on the role of meaning, memory, and moral frameworks in shaping collective action during crises, drawing on extensive fieldwork in post-apartheid South Africa. This work explores the dynamics of civil repair, racial violence, and the role of digital media in mediating community responses. Through this lens, he bring a global, theory-driven perspective to core sociological questions of meaning, action, and social transformation.
In addition to crisis response, he study long-term institutional approaches to reconciliation and public memory. His article, Recurating Robben Island: Cultural Objects, Digital Memory, and the Entropic Afterlives of National Heritage (American Journal of Cultural Sociology), analyzes how visitor-generated Instagram posts reframe the museum’s official narrative, revealing how digital platforms mediate fragmented and contested memory in post-conflict societies.