Dear Staff and the Class of 2017-2018,

Please join me in welcoming RSF Visiting Researcher, Philip Kasinitz, for his seminar, entitled, “The War on Immigrants Meets the War on Crime: Citizenship, Race and Social Exclusion.” The seminar will be in the Library as usual, at 11 AM on Wednesday, April 18th.

Philip Kasinitz is Presidential Professor of Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has chaired the doctoral program in Sociology since 2001-2011 and 2014-Present.  

Kasinitz specializes in immigration, ethnicity, race relations, urban social life and the nature of contemporary cities. Much of his work focuses on New York. He is the author of Caribbean New York for which he won the Thomas and Znaniecki Book Award in 1996. His co-authored book Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age won the Eastern Sociological Society’s Mirra Komarovsky Book Award in 2009 and the American Sociological Association Distinguished Scholarly Book Award in 2010.

Kasinitz served as the President of the Eastern Sociological Society in 2007-2008 and was awarded the Society’s “Merritt” Award for career contributions in 2015. Since 2005, he has been the book review editor of the ESS journal, Sociological Forum. He is a member of the Historical Advisory Board of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation and a former member of the Social Science Research Council’s Committee on International Migration and the Russell Sage Foundation’s committee to study the social effects of 9/11 on New York City.

Kasinitz is frequently quoted in media venues and his work has appeared in CNN On Line, New York Newsday; Dissent; The Nation; The Wall Street Journal; Lingua Franca, and Telos as well as in numerous academic journals. Prior to coming to the Graduate Center, Kasinitz taught at Williams College. He has held visiting appointments at Princeton University, The University of Amsterdam and the Technical University of Berlin.

During his time at RSF, Kasinitz will work on a book with RSF author and former board chair Mary Waters (Harvard University) that explores the changing landscape of racial and ethnic stratification in American society.

I hope everyone is looking forward—as I am—to what will no doubt be an interesting and productive discussion.