Former RSF Visiting Scholar and grantee Michèle Lamont (Harvard University) has been elected the 108th president of the American Sociological Association (ASA). Her one-year term began in August 2015.

During her time as a Visiting Scholar at the Foundation, Lamont researched the class, racial, and cultural differences among low-status white-collar and blue-collar workers residing in the suburbs of New York and Paris. She is editor of the book The Cultural Territories of Race (1999), which was co-published by RSF and the University of Chicago Press, and a contributor to the RSF volumes The Colors of Poverty (2010) and Evangelicals and Democracy in America (2011).

Lamont is currently Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and professor of sociology and African and African American studies at Harvard University. Previously, she chaired the Council for European Studies and was a member of the High Council on Science and Technology to the prime minister of France. As president of ASA, Lamont succeeds Ruth Milkman (CUNY Grad Center), who was also previously a Visiting Scholar at RSF and co-editor of the 2014 RSF book What Works for Workers.

Of her ASA term, Lamont stated, "I plan to work on enhancing sociology's influence in education, politics, and the media in order to broaden our impact as an enlightening, empowering, democratizing, and diversifying force."

This month the Russell Sage Foundation welcomes sixteen leading social scientists as Visiting Scholars for the 2015-2016 academic year. While in residence, they will pursue research that reflects RSF’s commitment to strengthening the social sciences and applying research more effectively to important social problems.

This year, the Visiting Scholars’ projects include an analysis of the factors that contribute to racial wealth disparities, research on how increases in economic inequality have affected voter turnout in congressional elections, and a study of over 1,000 twins that examines the relationship between genetic and social factors in adolescent development and academic achievement.

The Foundation also welcomes Marta Tienda (Princeton University) and Christopher Jencks (Harvard University) as Margaret Olivia Sage Scholars for the 2015-2016 academic year. Named to honor RSF’s founder, Margaret Olivia Sage, these scholars are nominated and selected by the Board of Trustees on the basis of their outstanding career accomplishments and relationship with the Foundation.

Robert Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor of the American Prospect, and labor journalist Steven Greenhouse (formerly of the New York Times) will also join RSF this fall as Visiting Researchers. Both researchers, who are recipients of Presidential Authority Awards, will work on book manuscripts during their time in residence.

Below is a first look at new and forthcoming books from the Foundation for Fall 2015. The list includes Parents Without Papers, a new investigation of the barriers to Mexican immigrant integration in the U.S.; Race, Class and Affirmative Action, a comparative study of the differing affirmative action policies in the U.S. and Israel; Unequal City, an examination of how disadvantaged Chicago youth navigate their neighborhoods, life opportunities, and encounters with the law; and Fear, Anxiety, and National Identity, a volume exploring the social and political backlashes to increasing immigration in North America and Western Europe. The first two issues of RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Severe Deprivation in America and Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 at Fifty and Beyond, will also be released this fall.

To request a printed copy of our Fall 2015 catalog, please contact Bruce Thongsack at bruce@rsage.org, or view the complete list of RSF books on our publications page.

Several of the Foundation's former Visiting Scholars, and RSF Robert K. Merton Scholar Robert Solow, have recently published new op-eds detailing some of their ongoing research.

Last week, writing for the New York Times, former Visiting Scholar Mark VanLandingham outlined the factors that contributed to the high rate of return of the Vietnamese to New Orleans following the destruction of Hurricane Katrina. While some commentators have attributed the post-Katrina success of the Vietnamese to cultural values specific to Asian immigrants, VanLandingham explained that their recovery was enabled by a confluence of several different advantages, including the economic and social capital they possessed prior to the hurricane. As he writes:

First, consider that Vietnamese-Americans in New Orleans represent a select group of Vietnamese. Specifically, those who came to the United States were wealthier than those who stayed behind in Vietnam. (A spot on a departing vessel was too expensive for many.) First-generation Vietnamese in New Orleans also score better on measures of general health than do their counterparts in Vietnam. Because of the forces of selection underlying migration, the Vietnamese in America are not representative of the Vietnamese overall — challenging the idea of some shared cultural superiority. Read more

Former Visiting Scholars and RSF authors Karthick Ramakrishnan and Jennifer Lee also recently penned new articles drawing from their research. Responding in the Washington Post to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s comments on undocumented immigrants entering the U.S., Ramakrishnan pointed out in a new op-ed that

states have become much more robustly engaged on immigration regulation, a process that started in the 1970s and has accelerated in the past decade. Federal courts have limited the scope of some of these efforts. Most notably, in 2012, the Supreme Court’s United States v. Arizona decision severely restricted how much states could independently get involved in immigration enforcement. Nevertheless, states are much more central players on immigration regulation now than, say, during the 1930s. Back then, the federal government enlisted the help of states and counties to forcibly repatriate upwards of 1 million Mexican immigrants and their U.S.-born children to Mexico. Read more