This is the first in a three-part series during Black History Month celebrating outstanding Black academicians and their work.
Elijah Anderson, Yale University
A trained sociologist, Dr. Elijah Anderson is one of the nation’s leading urban ethnographers. He holds the William K. Lanman Jr. Professorship in Sociology and is Professor of African American Studies at Yale University, where he teaches and directs the Urban Ethnography Project.
Anderson has been lauded for his groundbreaking scholarship. His 1999 book Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City won the Komarovsky Award from the Eastern Sociological Society. His most recent work, The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life, focuses on how city dwellers often interact across racial, ethnic and social borders.
About the book, sociologist Dr. William Julius Wilson of Harvard University noted: “Anderson provides an incredibly rich narrative of the intersections of city dwellers from different segregated neighborhoods — ghettos, ethnic enclaves and suburbs — in public places. By revealing hidden social and racial dynamics, Anderson not only explains the conditions that erase racial tensions and promote interracial harmony, but those that reinforce traditional racial boundaries, as well.”
In 2007, Anderson left the University of Pennsylvania, where he was the Charles and William L. Day Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology and had a secondary appointment at the Wharton School.
Before joining the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in 1975, Anderson taught at Swarthmore College. He received his bachelor’s degree at Indiana University, his master’s at the University of Chicago and his doctorate from Northwestern University, where he was a Ford Foundation fellow.
