Dear RSF:
Please join us next Wednesday, January 21st at 11 in the library and on Zoom for a presentation by Visiting Scholar Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, “The Demography of Historical Memory — Ours and Other People’s.”
Wrigley-Field is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota and Associate Director of the Minnesota Population Center, and a current McKnight Presidential Fellow (2023-2026).
She is a sociologist and demographer, studying racial inequality in mortality in the historical and contemporary United States, specializing in finding comparisons and metrics that illuminate the human meaning of mortality disparities.
Wrigley-Field holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an MA in Philosophy from NYU, and BA in Sociology from NYU. Previous to her appointment in 2016 to the University of Minnesota, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at Columbia University.
At RSF she is analyzing how demography enables and constrains cultural and political change through population ties to historical events and experiences. For instance, she is investigating how the high death rates of older Black Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic reduced the number of Black Americans who have a living relative who experienced Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement. Her project draws on historical vital statistics, data from the IPUMS Multigenerational Linkage Project, and demographic models.