Reception immediately following lecture, 3:00-4:00, in 1120 Thompson Library.
Children of immigrants comprise one-in-five Americans under age 18 and their proportion is growing. Beyond the contentious politics of immigration policy lies the question of the extent to which new immigrants are successful in finding a place in American society. Professor Richard Alba will draw upon a strong sociological tradition of research on immigrant adaptation and assimilation to paint a portrait of the offspring of new immigrants and describe how their future is indelibly tied to the future of the entire country.
Richard Alba, CUNY Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Acting Director of the CUNY Center for Urban Research, will present the annual IPR Joan Huber Lecture and, jointly, contribute to OSU’s year-long “A Conversation on Immigration” program which is part of the Conversations on Morality, Politics, and Society (COMPAS) initiative launched by the OSU Center for Ethics and Human Values.
The seeds of Richard Alba’s interest in race, ethnicity and immigration were sown during his childhood in the Bronx of the 1940s and 1950s and nurtured intellectually at Columbia University, where he received his undergraduate and graduate education, completing his Ph.D. in 1974. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Increasingly, his teaching and research have taken on a comparative focus, encompassing the immigration societies of North America and Western Europe. He has carried out research in France and in Germany, with the support of Fulbright grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the German Marshall Fund, and Russell Sage Foundation. In 2003-04, he was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. His research has also received grant support from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
His books include:
- Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America (1990);
- Italian Americans: Into the Twilight of Ethnicity (1985); and
- the award-winning Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration (2003), co-written with Victor Nee.
His latest books, Blurring the Color Line: The New Chance for a More Integrated America and The Next Generation: Immigrant Youth in a Comparative Perspective (co-edited with Mary Waters) appeared in 2009 and 2011, respectively.
He has been elected President of the Eastern Sociological Society (1997-98) and Vice President of the American Sociological Association (2000-01).
