Search Fellows
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Naomi R. Gerstel
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Visiting Scholar
2011 to 2012
Gerstel and Dan Clawson will write a book examining how workplace time—scheduled hours, flex time, overtime, and vacation—is controlled and allocated. This working group will utilize data on the hours and schedules of low-wage nursing assistants, higher-wage emergency medical technicians and nurses, and high-income doctors. They will analyze how work time is regulated from the above by the state, firms, and management; negotiated or resisted by workers; and impacted by forces outside the workplace, such as family obligations and labor markets.
Jennifer Glass
University of Texas at Austin
Visiting Scholar
2021 to 2022
Glass will write a book about the unprecedented rise in American mothers’ labor force participation over the last 50 years, examining mothers’ increased economic responsibility for their children in a labor market that is punitive to workers with care responsibilities. Her manuscript will focus on the large proportions of children at risk of relying mostly or exclusively on their mothers' financial support. It will also explore the underlying reasons why employers and the state have decreased their support of children and their primary caregivers.
Pilar Gonalons-Pons
University of Pennsylvania
Visiting Scholar
2021 to 2022
Gonalons-Pons will conduct the first comprehensive comparative study of the feminization and devaluation of paid and unpaid childcare and eldercare. Drawing on survey data on care work that covers 30 countries and spans four decades, she will examine how women came to perform most care work, leading to severe economic penalties for those who perform such work.
Heidi Gottfried
Wayne State University
Visiting Scholar
2025 to 2026
Gottfried and Ruth Milkman will examine the complexities of the fast-growing U.S. home care labor market. They will compare formal employment in the Medicaid-funded market segment, formal employment in the privately paid segment, and the 'gray market,' in which clients hire home care workers through informal networks and pay them directly. The project draws on original interviews and survey data collected by Gottfried and Milkman.
Roger V. Gould
Yale University
Visiting Scholar
2001 to 2002
Roger V. Gould, professor of sociology at Yale University, will write a book on the structural origins of group violence. Gould's research suggests that violent behavior is not only an expression of deviant personality or cultural complexes but is also related to the overall structure of a relationship. Gould hypothesizes that violence is particularly likely to occur when parties have not clearly established who is dominant. While individuals assert rank by exhibiting courage or strength of character, groups claim rank through displays of cohesiveness.
John Hagan
Northwestern University
Visiting Scholar
2001 to 2002
John Hagan, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Sociology and Law at Northwestern University, will write a book on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). His study will include an analysis of the factors leading to the transformation of a social movement into a functioning legal institution. What effect, for example, did the political climate have on both the lag in global human rights enforcement since Nuremberg and on the new opportunities for enforcement arising at century's end?
Lynne Haney
New York University
Visiting Scholar
2017 to 2018
Haney will study the relationship between mass incarceration and the enforcement of child support at the federal, state, and local levels. She will use an ethnographic study of child support courts in three states and interviews with 150 formerly incarcerated fathers to explore how both child support debt and ongoing contact with the criminal justice system contribute to cycles of disadvantage and shape their identities as fathers.
Lingxin Hao
Johns Hopkins University
Visiting Scholar
2002 to 2003
Lingxin Hao, associate professor of sociology at The Johns Hopkins University, will undertake a project on the impact of welfare on the social mobility of immigrant parents and children. The shift in countries of origin from Europe to Asia and Latin America has contributed to lower educational and skill levels among recent immigrants and a greater need for public assistance on their part. Yet, as part of welfare reform, the federal government has sharply reduced the public safety net for immigrants.
Robert M. Hauser
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Visiting Scholar
2001 to 2002
Robert M. Hauser, the Vilas Research Professor of Sociology, Center for Demography and Ecology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, will explore the relationship between the economic and social resources of families and the educational outcomes of their children. As part of the Foundation's social inequality project, the study assesses the overall distribution of completed schooling, key transitions in the schooling process, and the pace at which students pass through the educational system.
Douglas Heckathorn
Cornell University
Visiting Scholar
2004 to 2005
Douglas Heckathorn, Professor of Sociology at Cornell University, will work on a book describing the theoretical underpinnings, methods, and applications of respondent-driven sampling (RDS), a statistical method for researching hard to reach populations. The book will explore how RDS can be used to study the assimilation of immigrants in New York and New Jersey, their workplace integration, and the integration of their children into mainstream American society.
Jen Heerwig
State University of New York, Stony Brook
Visiting Scholar
2018 to 2019
Heerwig will track the evolution of American corporate elites’ political preferences and behavior from 1980 to present day. She will analyze the extent to which these elites have influenced deregulation, the rollback of social welfare programs, and the reduction in income tax rates. She will also draw from a new longitudinal database that links corporate executives, directors, and board members to federal political donations to determine the extent to which individual contributions from corporate elites affect policy outcomes.
Peter Hepburn
Rutgers University–Newark
Visiting Scholar
2026 to 2027
Since enactment in 2012, the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program has moved one in every five units of public housing out of the traditional public housing system and into other subsidy streams. While approaches to rental housing assistance in the past several decades have focused on strategies aimed at poverty deconcentration and dispersal, RAD entails place-based investment and attempts to keep communities intact.
Diana Hernández
Columbia University
Visiting Scholar
2021 to 2022
Hernández will write a book exploring families’ struggles to afford household energy. She will focus on energy insecurity – the inability to adequately meet household energy needs – a problem facing one in three U.S. households. She will analyze 100 in-depth interviews conducted across ten sites in the first study to examine the challenges that households face in accessing and affording electricity, natural gas, and fuel oils. Hernández will study how this issue varies across regions, including both urban and rural settings and cold and warm weather climates.
Charles Hirschman
University of Washington
Visiting Scholar
1998 to 1999
Charles Hirschman, professor and chair of the department of sociology at the University of Washington, will write a book on shifting ethnic divisions over long periods of history and across societies, particularly in North America and Southeast Asia. Although the ebb and flow of ethnic conflict has varied considerably across the globe, Hirschman observes the significance of such large-scale historical forces as the expansion of empires in premodern societies, the spread of nations and nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and long distance migration.
Michael Hout
University of California, Berkeley
Visiting Scholar
1996 to 1997
Michael Hout, professor of sociology and director of the Survey Research Center at the University of California at Berkeley, conducted research on the dynamics of low-wage labor markets, writing two RSF working papers and completing a paper, "Speedbumps on the Road to Meritocracy," which argues that upward social mobility has been decreasing and downward social mobility increasing since the 1970s.
Amy Hsin
Queens College, City University of New York
Visiting Scholar
2019 to 2020
Hsin and Sofya Aptekar will examine the extent to which lack of legal status affects the lives of undocumented youth attending colleges in the City University of New York (CUNY) system. Drawing from administrative data and interviews with students, they will study differences in educational and employment trajectories, family dynamics, and other outcomes among undocumented youth from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia.
Onoso Imoagene
New York Univerity, Abu Dhabi
Visiting Scholar
2019 to 2020
Imoagene will study the experiences and outcomes of Nigerian and Ghanaian immigrants who migrated to the U.S. via the Diversity Visa Lottery Program. She will draw from interviews and ethnographic research to show how the diversity visa program and other immigration policies affect not just migrants, but their families and communities in their countries of origin.
Jelani Ince
University of Washington
Visiting Scholar
2026 to 2027
Ince will use evidence from a two-year (2018-2020) ethnography of Risen Church, an interracial church in St. Louis, Missouri, to examine why DEI initiatives fail despite explicit commitments to their successful implementation. Ince will use ethnographic, interview, and administrative data to develop a sociological theory of philanthropic capture: a structural condition in which philanthropic organizations tether diversity missions to the preferences of elite donors.
José Itzigsohn
Brown University
Visiting Scholar
2006 to 2007
José Itzigsohn, Associate Professor of Sociology and Ethnic Studies at Brown University, will write a book examining the labor market experiences and shifts in ethnic identity of Dominican immigrants as they adapt to American society in Providence, Rhode Island. His work will examine Dominican immigrants’ career trajectories, involvement with ethnic organizations, and attachments to their country of origin.
Elizabeth Jacobs
University of Connecticut
Visiting Scholar
2026 to 2027
Jacobs will examine skilled migration as a central and growing hallmark of U.S. migration policy. Using LinkedIn employment histories in tandem with longitudinal in-depth interviews, she will analyze how migration policy shapes the spatial and occupational mobility of skilled migrants moving between the United States and India. The project situates student and work visas within the complex maze of the U.S. migration system and articulates an institutional framework for understanding how state and corporate actors regulate and constrain opportunities for migrants and institutions alike.