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.

Edwin Amenta

University of California, Irvine

Visiting Researcher

Edwin Amenta will work on projects examining the impact of news coverage on social movements and public opinion. He will investigate which movements and movement organizations have been covered by the news the most, when they made the news, and how coverage has changed over the last century. He will also explore how movements are covered by the news and the factors that influence whether social movement organizations receive positive or negative news coverage, including the organization’s demands and the overall political environment.

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.

Adam Berinsky

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Visiting Researcher

Adam Berinsky will work on a project examining interventions to stop or slow the spread of political misinformation. Berinsky will test the efficacy of existing approaches to combatting the spread of misinformation, such as having unlikely sources correct falsehoods. He will also examine and develop new interactive and scalable interventions to slow the spread of misinformation by leveraging advances in the field of Artificial Intelligence.

Jason Brent

Duke University

Visiting Researcher

Jason Brent will work on a book examining the now largely forgotten effort at mass economic education to improve American’s understanding of the U.S. economy by the American Economic Association (AEA) in the 1960s.

Rogers Brubaker

University of California, Los Angeles

Visiting Researcher

Rogers Brubaker will work on a book that brings together literatures on populism, technocracy, digital governance, and digital infrastructures. The premise of the book is that digital infrastructures, including increasingly powerful forms of generative and agentic AI, are transforming politics and governance in fundamental ways by enabling and promoting new forms of populism and technology. These trends, previously seen as antithetical to one another, are increasingly seen as having a symbiotic relationship based on the perceived weakening efficacy of the two major political parties.

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.

Jennifer Eberhardt

Stanford University

Visiting Researcher

Jennifer Eberhardt will write articles drawing on police body-worn camera footage to examine police interactions with the public during traffic stops. Using large language models and related processing tools, Eberhardt will compare how language used by police varies during traffic stops in areas with and without a history of redlining.

Ingrid Ellen

New York University

Visiting Researcher

Ingrid Ellen will work on a book examining neighborhood policies in the United States. She will focus on how neighborhood policies have weighed the preferences of incumbent residents against the interests of potential future residents and broader societal goals—tensions that can often be seen across the country in NIMBY (not in my backyard) versus YIMBY (yes in my backyard) debates. Ellen will evaluate neighborhood policy initiatives from the 1910s through the 21st century.

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.

Zoltan Hajnal

University of California, San Diego

Visiting Researcher

Zoltan Hajnal will work on a series of articles and a book investigating whether changing the timing of local elections impacts policy and, ultimately, reduces economic inequality. At different times over the past decade, six states have shifted from off-cycle local elections, where the only items on the ballot are local contests, to on-cycle local elections, which are held on the same day as federal contests.

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.