Elijah Anderson appointed Sterling Professor of Sociology
Elijah Anderson, one of the nation’s most influential scholars in the field of urban inequality, was recently appointed Sterling Professor of Sociology and of African American Studies.
The Sterling Professorship is awarded to a tenured faculty member considered one of the best in his or her field and is one of the university’s highest faculty honors.
Anderson, who is one of the nation’s leading urban ethnographers and cultural theorists, joined the Yale faculty from the University of Pennsylvania in 2007. He is the author of the classic work “A Place on the Corner: A Study of Black Street Corner Men.” Anderson’s other publications include “Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City” (1999), winner of the Komarovsky Award from the Eastern Sociological Society; “Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community,” winner of the American Sociological Association’s Robert E. Park Award for the best published book in the area of urban sociology. Anderson’s most recent ethnographic work is titled “The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life.”
The Yale scholar began his career as an ethnographer by studying the city of Chicago. He has written and edited numerous articles, books, book chapters, and reports on the black experience, including “Of Old Heads and Young Boys: Notes on the Urban Black Experience,” commissioned by the National Research Council’s Committee on the Status of Black Americans; and “Sex Codes and Family Life among Inner-City Youth,” published in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Anderson also wrote the introduction to the re-publication of “The Philadelphia Negro,” by W.E.B. DuBois. He recently co-edited a volume titled “Inner-City Schools: Inequality and Urban Education” in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
Anderson has served on the board of directors of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and is formerly a vice-president of the American Sociological Association. He has served in an editorial capacity for a wide range of professional journals and special publications, including Qualitative Sociology, Ethnography, American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, City & Community, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. He has also served as a consultant to a variety of government agencies, including the White House, the United States Congress, the National Academy of Science, and the National Science Foundation. In addition, he was a member of the National Research Council’s Panel on the Understanding and Control of Violent Behavior.
Among the most recent awards and honors Anderson has earned are the Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award and the W.E.B DuBois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award, both from the American Sociological Association; the Eastern Sociological Society Merit Award; and the William Julius Wilson Award for the Advancement of Social Justice from Washington State University. Anderson was invited to deliver a keynote address at the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize Forum, which was held at Augsburg College and the University of Minnesota. His talk was titled “Race and Space in America’s Cities.” Anderson also participated in a panel discussion, “Peace by Design,” about urban spaces, historical injustices, infrastructure projects, and community organizing.
