Search Fellows | Russell Sage Foundation

Francesca Polletta

Columbia University

Visiting Scholar

2004 to 2005

Francesca Polletta, Associate Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, will study public deliberations on the rebuilding of lower Manhattan following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City in order to examine the effectiveness of such community forums in policymaking. Based on participant surveys following online and in-person meetings, she will examine the impact of these deliberative processes on public policy decisions and people's long-term civic participation.

Francesca Polletta

University of California, Irvine

Visiting Scholar

2018 to 2019

Polletta and Edwin Amenta will study the ways in which social movements have transformed culture and everyday life. Drawing from interviews, public polls, and media coverage of social movements such as the civil rights movement, gay and lesbian activism, movements around abortion, and anti-tax and anti-welfare movements, they will examine movements’ impact on public opinion, institutions such as medicine and higher education, and the cultural assumptions guiding policymakers.

Alejandro Portes

Princeton University

Margaret Olivia Sage Scholar

Alejandro Portes is Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Sociology Emeritus, Princeton University, and Professor of Law and Distinguished Scholar of Arts and Sciences, University of Miami. He is the author of 250 articles and chapters on national development, international migration, Latin American and Caribbean urbanization, and economic sociology. He has published 30 books and special issues.

Brian Powell

Indiana University

Visiting Scholar

2017 to 2018

Powell will work on a book on how Americans view access to higher education. Drawing from interviews and six years of data collection on views of higher education, he will investigate the extent to which the public believes college access should be expanded, and what role the government, families, and students should play in funding higher education. He will also analyze how public opinion has contributed to the formulation of education policies.

Monica Prasad

Northwestern University

Visiting Scholar

2015 to 2016

Prasad will write a book on the origins of the tax-cut movement, looking at how the decline of progressive taxation in the U.S. contributed to the revitalization of the Republican Party in the aftermath of Watergate. She will explore how the decline of progressive taxation and an unwillingness on the part of the political system to tolerate high tax rates on the wealthy has contributed to rising inequality. Using recently released archival sources, she will focus on the importance of tax cuts to the conservative resurgence, an issue that has been understudied in previous literature.

Harriet Presser

University of Maryland

Visiting Scholar

1998 to 1999

Harriet B. Presser, Distinguished University Professor and director, Center on Population, Gender, and Social Inequality, at the University of Maryland, is preparing a comprehensive assessment of the trend toward a twenty-four hour economy and its effect on American employment. Increasing numbers of Americans now work non-standard hours, including weekend, evening, night, and "split-shift" schedules, and such employment disproportionately involves women, minorities, and low-skill workers.

Natasha Quadlin

University of California, Los Angeles

Visiting Scholar

2022 to 2023

Quadlin will work on a book about the effects of gender, race/ethnicity, field of study, and academic achievement on the employment outcomes of recent college graduates. She will use résumé audit studies and survey experiments to better understand the underlying mechanisms behind gender and racial/ethnic inequalities in labor market outcomes.

Lincoln Quillian

Northwestern University

Visiting Scholar

2012 to 2013

Quillian will write a series of papers that examine the causes of racial and ethnic residential segregation in America. He will develop a simulation model of the urban residential system that will estimate the importance of factors such as housing market discrimination, individual preferences, affordability, and population characteristics in producing residential segregation.

Alexandrea Ravenelle

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Visiting Scholar

2023 to 2024

Ravenelle will work on a book examining the longer-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on precarious workers. She has conducted in-depth interviews with more than 70 workers to better understand how low-wage and restaurant workers and gig workers make sense of their experiences with the pandemic and how they assess risk.

Sean Reardon

Stanford University

Visiting Scholar

2014 to 2015

Reardon will write a book about the recent patterns in racial and socioeconomic academic achievement gaps in the U.S., focusing on achievement trends in metropolitan school districts. He will assess the extent to which achievement gaps can be attributed to socioeconomic disparities between groups. He will also estimate the effects of a set of education policies on ameliorating these gaps.

Adam Reich

Columbia University

Visiting Scholar

2022 to 2023

Reich will explore the changing prevalence and organization of work among incarcerated people during the era of mass incarceration from the 1970s to the present. He will analyze data from the Survey of Inmates in State Correctional Facilities and in-depth interviews with state correctional administrators and formerly incarcerated people. He will explain the decline of prison labor since 1970 and variation in how prison labor has been and continues to be understood and organized across the states.

Christopher Rhomberg

Yale University

Visiting Scholar

2006 to 2007

Christopher Rhomberg, Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale University, will write a book on the current crisis of American unions, focusing on the breakdown of collective bargaining. Using archival and interview research, he will explore the Detroit newspaper strike of the 1990s as a key example of modern industrial relations and social movements.

Cecilia L. Ridgeway

Stanford University

Visiting Scholar

2016 to 2017

Ridgeway will investigate the ways that social status functions as a de facto system of inequality and how this system is related larger structures of inequality. She will analyze a broad range of empirical evidence to understand how status matters to people and how hierarchies are formed. She will also study how these processes help transform group differences based on power or resources into systems of inequality based on gender, race, and class.

Belinda Robnett

University of California, Irvine

Visiting Scholar

2013 to 2014

Robnett will complete a book titled Surviving Success: Black Political Organizations in “Post-Racial” America, which will help to explain why organizations at the forefront of the Civil Rights successes of the 1960s, such as the NAACP and the SCLC, were unable to effect a comparable level of systemic change in the decades that followed. The book will contribute to a neglected area of black history, and expand our understanding of the factors that strengthen or weaken post-movement organization success.

Eva Rosen

Georgetown University

Visiting Scholar

2022 to 2023

Rosen (together with Philip ME Garboden) will co-author a book examining the supply-side dynamics of low-end rental housing markets in four cities. They will use over 150 semi-structured interviews with landlords and property managers, ethnographic observations, and administrative data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to better understand how low-end rentals work for poor tenants.

Wendy Roth

University of British Columbia

Visiting Researcher

Wendy Roth is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, focusing on race, ethnicity, and immigration, with substantive interests in Latin America, transnational processes, multiracial populations and identities, and intersections of race and genomics.

James Rule

State University of New York, Stony Brook

Visiting Scholar

1995 to 1996

James B. Rule, professor of sociology at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, completed the editing of Theory and Progress in Social Science, to be published by Cambridge University Press, and began work on a book dealing with the assimilation of computer technologies by more than 100 greater New York City private-sector firms. The book will examine the effects of computing on types and levels of employment, job surveillance and the quality of work, and the efficiency of organizations. Working Papers:

Rubén G. Rumbaut

University of California, Irvine

Visiting Scholar

2016 to 2017

Rumbaut and Cynthia Feliciano will work on a book that explores the socioeconomic, cultural, and political incorporation of the immigrant second generation, and how they completed their adult transitions during and after the Great Recession.

Rubén G. Rumbaut

Michigan State University

Visiting Scholar

1997 to 1998

Ruben G. Rumbaut professor of sociology at Michigan State University, prepared a book on children of immigrants that examines their efforts to participate successfully in American educational, social and economic life. Drawing upon major new research in San Diego and Miami, Rumbaut focused on the progress of Latin, Asian, and Caribbean youth.

Abigail C. Saguy

University of California, Los Angeles

Visiting Scholar

2023 to 2024

Saguy will explore how the legal principle of gender neutrality – i.e., that the state should not overtly discriminate based on gender – has advanced gender equality and how new understandings of “gender neutrality” are being used today to promote diverse forms of gender expression and a wider range of gender identities. To investigate these questions, Saguy draws on news media reporting, jurisprudence, and in-depth interviews with activists.