| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Orley Ashenfelter | | | Institution: | Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 2017 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 302. Economics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1942 | | | | | | |
Orley Ashenfelter's areas of specialization include labor economics, econometrics, and law and economics. His current research includes the cross-country measurement of wage rates, and many other issues related to the economics of labor markets.
Professor Ashenfelter has been the director of the Industrial Relations Section at Princeton University, director of the Office of Evaluation of the U.S. Department of Labor, a Guggenheim Fellow, and the Benjamin Meeker Visiting Professor at the University of Bristol. He is a recipient of the IZA Prize in Labor Economics, the Mincer Award for Lifetime Achievement of the Society of Labor Economists, and the Karel Englis Medal awarded by the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.
He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society of Labor Economics, and a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He edited the Handbook of Labor Economics, was editor of the American Economic Review, and the co-editor of the American Law and Economics Review. In 2018 he was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He is a past president of the American Economics Association, the American Law and Economic Association, and the Society of Labor Economics. Orley Ashenfelter was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2017. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Anne Case | | | Institution: | Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 2017 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 302. Economics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1957 | | | | | | |
Anne Case’s best known early work was on the political economy of competition between states, and how it affected the elections of governors; this work remains heavily cited today. Today, she is best known for a wide range of work on health, family structure, and demography. Her prize-winning work on the origin of the gradient showed that the effect of family income on child health steepens as the child grows older. She discovered that the inferior morbidity and superior mortality of women comes from the composition of disease: roughly, women get conditions that make them sick, and men get conditions that make them dead. She has made challenging discoveries on the effects of step-parenting, and on the premium that taller people receive in the labor market, which she attributes to nutritional and cognitive deficiencies in very young children. She is one of the leading scholars of the effects of the AIDS epidemic on child and family outcomes in South Africa.
Her paper on the deaths of despair among midlife whites in the U.S. won the PNAS’s Cozzarelli Prize and attracted enormous attention. In 2020 she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Anne Case was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2017. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Claude S. Fischer | | | Institution: | University of California, Berkeley | | | Year Elected: | 2017 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 301. Anthropology, Demography, Psychology, and Sociology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1948 | | | | | | |
Claude S. Fischer is Professor of the Graduate School in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has been since 1972. Most of his early research focused on urban studies, social networks, and economic inequality (The Urban Experience, 1976; Fischer et al., Networks and Places, 1977; To Dwell Among Friends, 1982; Fischer et al., Inequality by Design, 1996). More recently, he has worked on American social history: adoption of the telephone (America Calling, 1992); social change during the 20th century (Fischer and Hout, Century of Difference, 2006); and a social history of American culture and character (Made in America, 2010). In 2011, he published Still Connected: Family and Friends in America Since 1970. Several of these books have won awards. A collection of his columns for the Boston Review appeared in 2014 as Lurching Toward Happiness in America. His major current project, funded by the National Institute of Aging, is a multi-year panel study of how personal ties change. In 1996, Fischer won Robert and Helen Lynd Award of the American Sociological Association for lifetime contributions to urban studies. In 2011, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Fischer blogs at http://madeinamericathebook.wordpress.com/ . | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. David Hollinger | | | Institution: | University of California, Berkeley | | | Year Elected: | 2017 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 303. History Since 1715 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1941 | | | | | | |
From the time of my first publication in 1968, I have worked primarily in the intellectual and ethnoracial histories of the United States.
Thematically, my work has been inspired by an essay of 1967 by the great sinologist, Joseph R. Levenson, "The Province, the Nation, the World: The Problem of Chinese Identity." I read this as a graduate student. It led me to engage the tension between provincialism and cosmopolitanism. This tension I have explored in special relation to ethnoracial and religious affiliations. For many years I focused on the relation of Jews to American culture, and later moved to a focus on the varieties of Protestantism and their differing connections to the American nation. Central always has been the diversity of American society, and the challenge Americans have faced in deciding just whom to join with in the forming of communities.
Methodologically, my work has been inspired by the scholarship of Perry Miller, the great historian of New England Puritanism, and by the scholarly practices of medievalists. Both of these affected me in graduate school, at the same time I was reading Levenson. Miller showed me what intellectual history could be like, and the medievalists showed me what highly specialized, monographic scholarship on what the Germans call "advanced problems" looked like. I decided early on to try to write modern American history as it would be written by a medievalist. Hence I have written primarily analytic articles in the medievalist manner, focusing on this or that question (e.g., the question of ethnoracial mixture, or the problem of pragmatism). I have aimed not to tell stories, but to answer questions.
In keeping with this commitment to the analytic essay as a mode, I published many articles and relatively few book-length studies. This approach to research and writing appealed to me also because it enabled me to address a greater range of topics than if I had followed the normal path for historians, moving from one Big Book to another. Hence four of my books are collections of articles: In the American Province (Indiana University Press, 1985), Science, Jews, and Secular Culture (Princeton University Press, 1996), Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), and After Cloven Tongues of Fire (Princeton University Press, 2013). But I also wrote three more conventionally "book-like" books: Morris R. Cohen and the Scientific Ideal (MIT Press, 1975), Postethnic America (Basic Books, 1995, 2000, and 2006), and Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton University Press, 2017).
My entire career has been influenced by the experience of moving out of the church-intensive culture of my upbringing and finding myself more at home in the more or less standard, highly secular culture of the academic life of my generation. I have discussed this experience in an autobiographical essay, "Church People and Others," found within the collection, After Cloven Tongues of Fire. | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Beth A. Simmons | | | Institution: | University of Pennsylvania | | | Year Elected: | 2017 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 304. Jurisprudence and Political Science | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1958 | | | | | | |
Beth Simmons is a leading scholar of international law and institutions. She has done more than any other scholar to demonstrate the impact of treaties on state behavior and has pioneered studying the international diffusion of policies and institutions, combining historical, case-study, and sophisticated statistical analysis. Her first prize-winning book, Who Adjusts? Domestic Sources of Foreign Economic Policy During the Interwar Years 1923-1939, brilliantly integrated political science with economics in a study of an important period of international political economy; her second prize-winning book, Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics, powerfully demonstrated how international human rights agreements, which lack strong international enforcement, can become effective through mobilization by domestic groups. She has also done extremely important work on the politics and law of international monetary affairs and capital market regulation. Her overall standing in international relations and political science more generally is reflected in the fact that she is the second person to win the Woodrow Wilson Award twice (She is preceded only by Robert Dahl). | |
| |