Professor of Sociology
Princeton University
Network Member

Matthew Desmond is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University. After receiving his Ph.D. in 2010 from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he joined the Harvard Society of Fellows as a Junior Fellow. He is the author of four books, including Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016), which won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, Carnegie Medal, and PEN / John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. The principal investigator of The Eviction Lab, Desmond's resesarch focuses on poverty in America, city life, housing insecurity, public policy, racial inequality, and ethnography. He is the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award, and the William Julius Wilson Early Career Award. A Contributing Writer for the New York Times Magazine, Desmond was listed in 2016 among the Politico 50, as one of "fifty people across the country who are most influencing the national political debate."

Desmond received B.S. degrees in Communication and Justice Studies from Arizona State University in 2002, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2004 and 2010, respectively.

Discipline
Fields of Study