(Arènes de Lutèce, Paris, 2018)
Zachary V. Sunderman, Ph.D.
Hi! I'm Zack. This site is my way of aggregating all the relevant information about me and things I'm working on in one convenient space. Whatever brought you here, thanks for stopping by.
I'm from the vicinity of Youngstown, Ohio, USA. From 2013-2018, I lived in Manhattan, where I pursued my graduate degrees and my spouse, Kirsten, baked bread for Thomas Keller Restaurant Group. We moved back to Youngstown for a few years, but while we deeply love the Youngstown community, we are now in Westchester, NY (between NYC and the Catskills) with our daughter Katharina and our dog Molly.
My primary activity is my educational and research work as a sociologist (view my curriculum vitae here). I have always been driven to understand people (including myself) and how they work, and this led me down a path of introspection and investigation that eventually - with no lack of twists, turns, and temporary stops along the way - culminated in both a passion for sociological education and my particular sociological specialty, which I like to refer to as the search for "empirical answers to philosophical questions." I currently serve on the faculty of the Department of Social Sciences at SUNY Westchester Community College in Valhalla, NY.
I'm also a former musician whose life has been fundamentally formed and transformed by music, and after a nearly decade-long hiatus from 2013-2022, I returned to performing. You can find me on guitar in Fear of Dancing and in a duo with my wife called Meowma.
I'm a descendant of Clan Murray of Atholl, a medieval Scottish noble family with roots in the ancient Pictish power center of Moray. According to DNA, I also have ancestors from Germany (including the Sundermans), England, France, and Northern Ireland.
Along with Kirsten - and now, our baby daughter - I travel as much as possible. Sometimes we take advantage of the wide variety of great places available domestically, checking out coffee shops, record stores, vegan-friendly eateries, art museums, and beautiful scenery all over the country. Other times, we go further afield. So far, I've been to Marrakech and the Moroccan Sahara (2013), the Big Island of Hawai'i (2013), Transylvania (2017), Paris (2018, 2023, 2025), Iceland and Westman Islands (2019, 2024), the Mexican Yucatán (2020), London (2022, 2025) and Stonehenge (2022), Rome (2023, 2025) and Pompeii (2023), Lyon (2023), Copenhagen (2023), and Bologna (2025).
