Andrew McCumber

Andrew McCumber is an assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Tech. He holds a bachelor's degree in History as well as master's and doctorate degrees in sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Prior to joining Virginia Tech, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University.

Professor McCumber’s work, which spans qualitative and computational methodologies, examines cultural meaning making as it relates to nature and environmental problems. His book, Bad Nature: How Rat Control Shapes Human and Nonhuman Worlds, examines how projects of rat extermination shaped and are shaped by the social context where they occur. It will be published in 2025 by the University of Chicago Press.

His research has also appeared in peer reviewed journals including Poetics, Sociological Forum, American Journal of Cultural Sociology among others.