Search Fellows | Russell Sage Foundation

Maria Abascal

New York University

Visiting Researcher

Maria Abascal will write up the results of four studies that examine how Americans classify themselves and others in terms of race/ethnicity and the consequences of these classifications for racial/ethnic inequality. The first two projects, which draw on nationally representative surveys, explore which people are likely to be classified by others as people of color or as Latino. The third project investigates whether people from higher socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to be classified as White during traffic stops.

Mark Baldassare

Public Policy Institute of California

Visiting Researcher

Mark Baldassare is president and CEO of the Public Policy Institute of California, where he holds the Arjay and Frances Fearing Miller Chair in Public Policy. He is a leading expert on public opinion and survey methodology, and has directed the PPIC Statewide Survey since 1998. Before joining PPIC, he was a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of California, Irvine, where he held the Johnson Chair in Civic Governance.

Arielle Baskin-Sommers

Yale University

Visiting Researcher

Arielle Baskin-Sommers will design and begin implementation of an original procedural justice training program for correctional officers. Baskin-Sommers’ work builds on research that shows that incarcerated individuals are one of the most marginalized populations in the United States and prisons play a significant role in reproducing disadvantage, particularly through negative interactions between correctional officers and the incarcerated.

Rich Benjamin

Independent Journalist

Visiting Researcher

Rich Benjamin will work on a book investigating how White anxieties about White demographic decline, both real and perceived, shape economic, political, and racial inequality in the United States. His book will reveal how seemingly race-neutral issues such a fiscal policy and the social safety net are defined by racial anxiety over perceived White decline. More specifically, the project will illuminate how White status threat creates opposition to, or support for, presumably “universalist” economic policies such as investment in universal preschool and increasing the federal minimum wage.

Ajay Chaudry

Visiting Researcher

Chaudry worked on a book analyzing policies for providing early childhood services to children and families. He extended the research from his 2004 RSF book Putting Children First, exploring the challenges faced by low-income single mothers while their children were growing up.

Andrew J. Cherlin

Johns Hopkins University

Visiting Researcher

Andrew J. Cherlin is the Benjamin H. Griswold III Professor of Public Policy in the Department of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. In an effort to examine the current state of the white and black working classes, Cherlin will write up findings from a recent study of white and black former workers at a now-shuttered Baltimore steel plant and their adult children.

Angie Chung

State University of New York, Albany

Visiting Researcher

Angie Chung will write a book examining the rise of immigrant growth coalitions among ethnic entrepreneurs, political leaders, financiers, and auxiliary players who shape land use and redevelopment processes in globalizing cities. Based on fieldwork and interviews in Koreatown and Monterey Park, California, Chung will focus on how Korean and Chinese immigrant leaders have promoted their economic growth agenda in Los Angeles amidst suburbanization, political barriers, and economic recessions.

Andrei Cimpian

New York University

Visiting Researcher

Andrei Cimpian is Associate Professor of Psychology at New York University. He will investigate the developmental origins of pervasive cultural stereotypes that link certain groups more than others (such as men more than women) with raw intellectual talent or “brilliance.”

Greg J. Duncan

University California, Irvine

Visiting Researcher

Greg Duncan is Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of California, Irvine. He was a visiting scholar at RSF during the 2016-2017 academic year and is co-editor of the RSF books Whither Opportunity?, For Better and for Worse, Neighborhood Poverty Volume 1 and Volume 2, Consequences of Growing Up Poor, co-author of the RSF book Higher Ground, and the recipient of multiple grants from the foundation.

Gary Alan Fine

Northwestern University

Visiting Researcher

Fine will draft a book and several articles exploring the mobilization of older citizens for social justice. Drawing on research on aging and gerontology and based on extensive ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews, Fine’s project argues that the structural and cultural position of the elderly produces a distinctive form of organizing, creating resistance based on identity and experience.

Rowena Gray

University of California, Merced

Visiting Researcher

Rowena Gray is Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of California, Merced. She will examine the historical housing market in New York City, documenting the price and quality of housing between 1880 and 1910, and analyzing how housing and neighborhoods changed as immigrants arrived. She will also study the impact of immigration on crime in 30 U.S. cities between 1880 and 1930 by analyzing data from police records and other archival sources.

Steven Greenhouse

The New York Times

Visiting Researcher

Greenhouse is labor and workplace correspondent for the New York Times. At RSF he worked on a book on the future of the American worker, exploring the decline of labor unions, the growth of alternative, non-union worker advocacy groups, and policies designed to improve the labor market outcome of workers.

Ran R. Hassin

Columbia University

Visiting Researcher

Ran Hassin will advance research on the diversity illusion phenomenon – people’s tendency to literally see and remember more diversity than there is in reality. He will complete current projects and write a paper on blindness to an extreme lack of diversity. He will also begin planning new lines of research.

Annika Hinze

Fordham University

Visiting Researcher

Annika Hinze will work on a project using “ambos Nogales” – sister towns Nogales, Sonora, Mexico and Nogales, Arizona, USA which sit across from each other on the U.S.-Mexico border – as a case study for the social, political, and local impact of U.S. border fortification policies. She will examine everyday practices that resist, rework, and/or reproduce boundaries between individuals, communities, and countries along the border.

Michael Jones-Correa

University of Pennsylvania

Visiting Researcher

Michael Jones-Correa is the President’s Distinguished Professor of Political Science and founding Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Immigration (CSERI) at the University of Pennsylvania. He taught previously at Harvard and at Cornell, where he served as the Robert J. Katz Chair of the Department of Government.

Philip Kasinitz

City University of New York

Visiting Researcher

Kasinitz is Professor of Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. He will work on a book with RSF author and former board chair Mary Waters (Harvard University) that explores the changing landscape of racial and ethnic stratification in American society.

Shamus Khan

Columbia University

Visiting Researcher

Khan will write a book, Exceptional: The Astors, Elite New York, and the Story of American Equality, that traces the history of American inequality from the 1790s to 2006 by focusing on the position and experiences of the elite in New York City.

Robert Kuttner

American Prospect

Visiting Researcher

Kuttner is the founder and co-editor of the American Prospect. At RSF he worked on a book assessing how globalization has complicated the project of managing capitalism and even affected democracy itself. He investigated the extent to which globalization, technology, cultural shifts, and domestic policies have contributed to growing wealth and income inequality in the U.S. and other countries.

Mona Lynch

University of California, Irvine

Visiting Researcher

Mona Lynch will draw on video-recorded deliberations data from two large-scale mock jury studies that test how the race of defendants and individual jurors and jury group racial characteristics interact in predicting verdicts in a drug conspiracy case. Both studies resulted in an unexpected finding: mock jurors became significantly less supportive of a guilty verdict for a Black defendant charged in a federal drug conspiracy case, relative to a white defendant, after small group deliberations.

Jane Mansbridge

Visiting Researcher

Jane Mansbridge is Charles F. Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values at Harvard University. She is the author of Beyond Adversary Democracy, an empirical and normative study of face-to-face democracy, and the award-winning Why We Lost the ERA, a study of anti-deliberative dynamics in social movements based on organizing for an Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.