Jon Eastwood to Deliver Lecture in Honor of His Appointment to the William P. Ames Jr. Professorship in Sociology Eastwood’s talk, titled “Reflections on the Sociology of Cynicism and Distrust,” will be held Feb. 19 in Northen Auditorium.

By Brian Laubscher
January 27, 2026

Jon Eastwood, professor of sociology at Washington and Lee University, will present a public lecture to mark his appointment to the William P. Ames Jr. Professorship.

Eastwood’s lecture, “Reflections on the Sociology of Cynicism and Distrust,” will be held at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 19, in Northen Auditorium, Leyburn Library. The talk is free and open to the public and will be immediately followed by a reception held in Leyburn 128.

Eastwood will discuss his ongoing research on contemporary cynicism and distrust, a project that he has been developing in collaboration with his students. The talk will highlight American and global trends drawn from comparative international survey data and share preliminary findings from a related project he is conducting with Guangpu Chen ’24 that examines the radius of trust.

“A lot of people are worried about the apparent rise of interpersonal and institutional distrust in the U.S. and across the world,” said Eastwood. “I started this project because I shared those concerns. I initially oriented this work via a theoretical framing provided by the 18th-century Neapolitan thinker Giambattista Vico, who argued that societies fail when their members become cynical, losing belief in each other and withdrawing from large-scale cooperative projects. Is that happening to us? Having now worked with a lot of survey data on the topic, I think our situation is more complicated than the scenario that Vico’s theory describes, and that, despite real concerns, the sky is not necessarily falling.”

In his talk, Eastwood hopes to share a big picture story about what we can and can’t conclude about contemporary cynicism from an analysis of major sources of survey data from recent decades, oriented more toward the broader public than to specialists.

“I’ll also aim to provide a brief and general overview of the methods Guangpu and I are developing to measure better how trust tends to decline as a function of the social distance between truster and trustee, and how national contexts might shape what that decline looks like, as the general patterns tend to vary quite strikingly from society to society,” he added.

A member of the W&L faculty since 2006, Eastwood is the author of “Social Structure: Relationships, Representations and Rules,” published by Polity in February 2025. He also co-authored “Comparative Politics: Integrating Theories, Methods, and Cases,” which has had four different editions over the years. The original version was co-authored in 2012 with the late J. Tyler Dickovick, Grigsby Term Professor of Politics. The most recent edition was co-authored in 2023 with Robin LeBlanc, professor of politics, and Zoila Ponce de León, former assistant professor of politics.

Eastwood currently serves as head of the university’s Sociology and Anthropology Department and is a core member in the Shepherd Program for Interdisciplinary Study of Poverty and Human Capability and the Data Science Program. A social theorist with a strong interest in quantitative and computational methods, he holds a bachelor’s degree and doctorate from Boston University.

The William P. Ames Jr. Professorship was established in 2000 under the will of Mrs. Mary Farley Lee in honor and memory of her brother, William, a 1941 graduate of Washington and Lee. Eastwood is the third holder of the Ames Professorship, joining retired professors of sociology, O. Kendall White Jr. (2001-08) and Krzysztof Jasiewicz (2008-24).