Search Fellows
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Carol H. Shiue
University of Texas, Austin
Visiting Scholar
2002 to 2003
Carol Shiue, assistant professor of economics at the University of Texas, Austin, will examine the role of extended family networks and intergenerational migration patterns in risk-sharing. Recent scholarship has assumed that the increasing influence of market mechanisms in rural economies will erode traditional kinship relationships based on trust and mutual economic dependence, and give rise to financially independent nuclear households. Yet many such networks effectively reposition themselves in response to new market opportunities without disintegrating.
Lara Shore-Sheppard
Williams College
Visiting Scholar
2022 to 2023
Shore-Sheppard will examine pre-retirement (ages 50-61) households with multigenerational or skipped-generation living arrangements. She will focus on how the generosity of safety net programs for families with children, social and economic factors, and the interaction between these factors and safety net generosity impact living arrangements. She will also explore the extent to which living arrangements in pre-retirement years affect the well-being of older adults.
James Sidanius
Harvard University
Visiting Scholar
2001 to 2002
Jim Sidanius, professor of psychology and political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, Shana Levin, assistant professor of psychology at Claremont McKenna College, and Colette van Laar, professor of psychology and education at Leiden University, the Netherlands, will study the impact of the multicultural undergraduate experience on ethnic tolerance and on tensions between different racial and ethnic groups.
Susan Silbey
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Visiting Scholar
2014 to 2015
Silbey will employ ten years of ethnographic research to write a book that examines the growing tension between federal law and laboratory science. She finds that new federal lab regulations and audits, often implemented in the name of safety, threaten the autonomy of scientific practice and establish precedents for the legal surveillance of similar innovation-based professions.
Jennifer M. Silva
Indiana University
Visiting Scholar
2022 to 2023
Silva will work on a book about the persistence of health disparities using electronic health records, physicians’ notes, and interviews with 48 White women and 40 Black and Latina women without a college degree. She will examine how divergences between the medical records and patient narratives might be associated with inappropriate treatment plans, patient “noncompliance,” and missed appointments that contribute to health disparities and the underlying social factors that contribute to poor quality of life and barriers to achieving care and well-being.
Angela Simms
Barnard College
Visiting Scholar
2023 to 2024
Simms will investigate how ostensibly race-neutral government budget and policy processes create and sustain racial inequity within metropolitan areas. She focuses on the experience of a majority-Black and middle-class jurisdiction’s capacity to maintain high-quality public goods and services.
Patrick Simon
National Institute for Demographic Studies
Visiting Scholar
2010 to 2011
Simon will write a book comparing integration of immigrants in France and the United States. He will specifically discuss the role of racial discrimination against first- and second-generation immigrants in both countries. The comparative framework will allow for an assessment of how different social policies might influence racial and ethnic identification.
Stacey Sinclair
Princeton University
Visiting Scholar
2013 to 2014
Sinclair will write a series of articles examining how interpersonal interactions translate implicit prejudice into ethnic disparities in schools. Sinclair’s research will provide novel insights into how peers’ implicit racial attitudes influence students’ sense of belonging at school as well as their academic engagement and performance.
Peter Skerry
Boston College
Visiting Scholar
2006 to 2007
Peter Skerry, Professor of Political Science at Boston College, will write a book on the social and political integration of Muslims in contemporary America. Based on his fieldwork in several U.S. cities, the book will explore how a distinct American Muslim identity is emerging from the presence of Arab, South Asian, and African-American Muslims in the United States.
Timothy M. Smeeding
Syracuse University
Visiting Scholar
2007 to 2008
Markus Jäntti, Professor of Economics, Åbo Akademi University, Finland, and Timothy Smeeding, Distinguished Professor of Economics and Public Administration, Syracuse University, form a working group that will compare recent patterns of social and economic mobility in the United States with other advanced economies in an effort to determine whether America’s high rate of economic inequality is mitigated by greater economic mobility.
Alastair Smith
New York University
Visiting Scholar
2012 to 2013
Smith will investigate voting behavior and the ways parties solicit votes. He will build on existing formal models to argue that parties reward voting groups that offer them the greatest level of support. In this model, individual voters have much greater influence over the distribution of local rewards than over which party wins elections.
Robert Smith
Baruch College, City University of New York
Visiting Scholar
2007 to 2008
Robert Smith, Associate Professor of Sociology, Immigration Studies, and Public Affairs at Baruch College and Graduate Center, CUNY, will write a book on the education, employment, and social lives of young adult children of Mexican immigrants in New York City. Smith will use data from a ten-year ethnographic study to document the factors that contribute to both upward and downward mobility.
Sandra Susan Smith
New York University
Visiting Scholar
2002 to 2003
Sandra Smith, assistant professor of sociology at New York University, will study the efficacy of low-income African-Americans' job referral networks. It is often argued that as a result of structural and demographic changes there has been an overall decline in the sheer number of people to which the urban poor are connected. Recent evidence suggests that the extent of the poor's detachment from the mainstream has been overestimated.
Laurel Smith-Doerr
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Visiting Scholar
2026 to 2027
Smith-Doerr will conduct an inductive, qualitative study on the power dynamics that shape who benefits from artificial intelligence in the workplace. She will use the U.S. long haul trucking industry as an important case study to examine how truckers encounter and resist narratives which assume that AI can substitute for human decision-making on the job.
Kenneth Sokoloff
University of California, Los Angeles
Visiting Scholar
2004 to 2005
Kenneth Sokoloff, Professor of Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles, will work on a comparative economic history of the Americas. He will argue that factors of production (e.g. climate and population) predisposed Caribbean colonies - which were well suited for specialization in crops that could be produced cheaply on large slave plantations - to more inequality than existed in northern colonies.
Robert Solow
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Visiting Scholar
1999 to 2000
Robert Solow, Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will co-chair the steering committee for the Foundation's project (co-funded by the Century Foundation) on sustaining low unemployment. Solow will also pursue two research projects of his own. In the first, Solow will model how productivity gains depend upon technical change being "embodied" in new investments of physical capital (the latest computer chip technology, for instance, is of no benefit to a firm until that firm invests in new, faster computers).
Xi Song
University of Pennsylvania
Visiting Scholar
2023 to 2024
Song will investigate discrimination against Asian Americans in the labor market. She will analyze linked longitudinal data from Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics, the American Community Survey, the Census, and the National Survey of College Graduates and compare earning trajectories among Asian American subgroups and Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics.
Judith Stacey
New York University
Visiting Scholar
2005 to 2006
Judith Stacey, Professor of Sociology and Gender and Sexuality at New York University, will finish writing an ethnographic book about gay male intimacy in Los Angeles. Based on ethnographic interviews and fieldwork with 50 gay men from diverse backgrounds, the book will discuss the social implications of trends in family values, planned gay parenthood, interracial intimacy, fidelity, and “open relationships” among gay men. The book will also look at gay-friendly family policies enacted in other nations and will discuss how U.S.
Carol B. Stack
University of California, Berkeley
Visiting Scholar
1995 to 1996
Carol B. Stack, professor Graduate School of Education and Women's Studies, University of California, Berkeley, and Katherine S. Newman, professor of anthropology at Columbia University, jointly worked on their project "Why Work?", an investigation of the role of minimum wage jobs in the survival of poverty-level families living in two major urban ghettos, New York City's Harlem and Oakland, California.
David Stark
Columbia University
Visiting Scholar
2002 to 2003
David Stark, the Arnold A. Saltzman Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Columbia University, will write a book on the co-evolution of organizational forms and interactive technologies in new media firms, electronic trading rooms, and digital crossroads in Eastern Europe. At mid-century, organizational analysts charted the rise of bureaucratic organizations and the emergence of mass communication.