Matthew Desmond

Matthew Desmond is the Maurice P. During Professor 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 five books, including Poverty, by America (2023) and Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016), which won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Carnegie Medal, and PEN / John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. The principal investigator of The Eviction Lab, Desmond’s research 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.

Matthew Desmond

Matthew Desmond is the Maurice P. During Professor 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 five books, including Poverty, by America (2023) and Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016), which won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Carnegie Medal, and PEN / John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. The principal investigator of The Eviction Lab, Desmond’s research 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.

Books by Matthew Desmond

  • Race in America

    Matthew Desmond, Mustafa Emirbayer

    Paperback, 2016

    A groundbreaking approach to thinking about race and racism today.
  • Race in America

    Matthew Desmond, Mustafa Emirbayer

    Second Edition, Paperback, 2020

    Equip your students to engage with the most urgent issues of our time.
  • Race in America

    Matthew Desmond, Mustafa Emirbayer

    Second Edition, E Book, 2020

    Equip your students to engage with the most urgent issues of our time.
  • Race in America

    Matthew Desmond, Mustafa Emirbayer, Karida Brown, Victor Ray

    Third Edition, Paperback, 2025

    The most intersectional book equips students to engage with the most urgent issues of our time