| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Paul DiMaggio | | | Institution: | New York University; Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 2016 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 301. Anthropology, Demography, Psychology, and Sociology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1951 | | | | | | |
Paul DiMaggio is Professor of Sociology at New York University, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Data Science, The Wagner School of Public Policy and the Stern School of Business. Between 1992 and January 2016, he taught at Princeton University, where he is currently A. Barton Hepburn Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs and where he served terms as Chairman and Director of Graduate Studies of the Sociology Department, Director of the Center for the Study of Social Organization, and Research Director of the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies. In 1979, he went to Yale University as a Postdoctoral Fellow, later rising from Assistant Professor to Professor in the Sociology Department and the School of Management and serving as Director of the Program on Non-Profit Organizations. DiMaggio’s work has addressed such topics as the impact of cultural capital on educational attainment, the origins of the strong distinction between high culture and popular culture in the United States, the structure of organizational fields and factors that lead organizations within a field to become more similar over time, cultural politics (including arts policy, opinion polarization on social issues, and nationalism) in the United States, the role of networks in consumer decision making, the implications of cognitive science for the sociology of culture, the impact of network externalities for social inequality, and applications of computational text analysis to the study of cultural change. A graduate of Swarthmore College, he received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Thomas C. Holt | | | Institution: | University of Chicago | | | Year Elected: | 2016 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 303. History Since 1715 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1942 | | | | | | |
Currently the James Westfall Thompson Distinguished Service Professor of American and African American History at the University of Chicago, Tom Holt has a longstanding professional interest in comparing the experiences of people in the African diaspora, particularly those in the Caribbean and the United States. Elected president of the American Historical Association for 1994-95, Holt has been a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow since 1990 and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2003. Last year Holt was a recipient the Wilbur Cross Medal, awarded by Yale University in recognition of distinguished alumni. His most significant publications are a study of Jamaica's economy, politics, and society after slavery, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938, which was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1992 and awarded the Elsa Goveia Prize by the Association of Caribbean Historians in 1995. In 1978, the Southern Historical Association awarded the Charles S. Sydnor Prize for Holt's first book, Black Over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina During Reconstruction, published by the University of Illinois Press in 1977, which dealt with a comparable period in the American South after emancipation. Holt's Nathan I. Huggins’ lectures, The Problem of Race in the 21st Century, were published by Harvard University Press in 2000. He is co-author with Rebecca J. Scott and Frederick Cooper of Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies, which was published by the University of North Carolina Press, also in 2000. With Elsa Barkley Brown, he has edited a two-volume collection of essays and documents on African American History, Major Problems in African American History, published by Houghton Mifflin in 2000. In 2010, Holt published Children of Fire: A History of African Americans (Hill&Wang), a synthetic account of African American History from its 16th century beginnings to the present. Holt’s most recent publication is Race, the 24th volume of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (2013), which he edited with Laurie Green for the University of North Carolina Press. In that collection of essays, they explore the multi-racial - as opposed to the more conventional bi-racial - history and present of the American South. Prof. Holt is currently working on a study of the Civil Rights Movement for Oxford University Press and on a study of the problem of race in the Atlantic World with Leora Auslander.
Professor Holt earned BA and MA degrees in English Literature from Howard University and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. Prior to his academic career Holt worked in the federal anti-poverty program (the Office of Economic Opportunity) developing educational, employment, and housing programs for economically disadvantaged seasonal and migrant farmworkers. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Sara McLanahan | | | Institution: | Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 2016 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 301. Anthropology, Demography, Psychology, and Sociology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1941 | | | Death Date: | December 31,2021 | | | | | | |
A specialist in family demography, inequality, and social policy, Sara McLanahan’s research has shaped our understanding of the nature, causes, and consequences of changing family structures. She has focused on the role of the family in the reproduction of poverty. Her 1994 book, Growing Up with a Single Parent, was the first major study using national data to examine the effects of divorce for children’s well-being. McLanahan created the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a nationally representative longitudinal birth cohort study of about 5,000 families. In addition to a series of important findings about the lives of unmarried parents and their children, the study’s data have been used by scholars from multiple disciplines to analyze different issues pertaining to disadvantaged populations. McLanahan is currently investigating how the interplay between genetic markers and family environments shapes child development. She is the William S. Tod Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs Emeritus and Founding Director of the Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing at Princeton University. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2019). Sarah McLanahan was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2016. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. Rogers M. Smith | | | Institution: | University of Pennsylvania | | | Year Elected: | 2016 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 304. Jurisprudence and Political Science | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1953 | | | | | | |
A leading scholar of American Public Law and the politics of membership, Rogers Smith’s work proceeds on both normative and empirical tracks. His early normative scholarship defended a liberal jurisprudence, spelling out its implications for U.S. Supreme Court decisions and American constitutional purposes. His empirical work documented competing visions of citizenship in U.S. history, culminating in his widely acclaimed Civic Ideals. This work details the liberal and republican traditions more richly than had hitherto been attempted, but also excavates long neglected traditions that cleave to various nativist, religious, racially supremacist, and other exclusionary ideologies. It recast debates about American exceptionalism and provided the impetus for Smith’s subsequent normative scholarship. In that work he has argued that political communities and political statuses should be reformed so as to be more inclusive, in the course of which he has made extensive contributions to the literatures on affirmative action, immigration, and minority representation. | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Richard White | | | Institution: | Stanford University | | | Year Elected: | 2016 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 303. History Since 1715 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1947 | | | | | | |
I was born in New York City, and grew up in and around Los Angeles. I attended the University of California at Santa Cruz and received my Ph.D. from the University of Washington. I am an accidental historian inspired by my involvement in Indian fishing rights controversies in Washington in the late 1960s. One thing led to another, and my interest in Native American and Western history led me to environmental history. I have more recently become interested in memory and history and in political economy. I find it hard to specialize, and equally hard to stay within my own discipline. Maybe I just have a short attention span.
I have also found it hard to stay in one place. I have taught at Michigan State, the University of Utah, the University of Washington, and Stanford University, where I have remained largely because the university has treated me well and my wife became a born-again Californian. She has no intention of leaving.
I have always been interested in the techniques of writing history and the crafting of narratives; after receiving a Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities, I used the grant to co-found the Spatial History Project at Stanford and became fascinated by digital visualizations as a way to analyze and present historical data. This, in turn, has increased my interest in photography.
Although I am primarily a historian of the United States, I have written about Mexico, Canada, and France as well as Ireland. I also have an interest in New Zealand, Australia, and the Pacific World but this has not, so far, led to publications. | |
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