Board of Trustees Approves New Faculty Appointments

July 10, 2017

Susan Promislo, Office of Communications

The Princeton University Board of Trustees has approved the appointment of 18 faculty members, including five full professors and 13 assistant professors. Meet the following faculty members joining the Department of Sociology:

Matthew Desmond, in sociology, will join the faculty in summer 2017 from Harvard University, where he is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences and co-director of the Justice and Poverty Project. He has taught at Harvard since 2012, where he completed his postdoctoral fellowship, and earlier received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his B.S. from Arizona State University. Desmond’s primary teaching and research interests include urban sociology, poverty, race and ethnicity, organizations and work, social theory, and ethnography.

Jennifer Jennings, in the Woodrow Wilson School and sociology, will join the faculty in summer 2017. An associate professor at New York University, where she has taught since 2011, Jennings was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard. She earned her Ph.D. from Columbia University, M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge and A.B. from Princeton. Jennings specializes in analyzing racial, socioeconomic, and gender disparities in educational and health outcomes.

Frederick Wherry, in sociology, will join the faculty in summer 2017 from Yale University, where he has been a professor since 2013 and co-director of the Center for Cultural Sociology. Wherry was an associate professor at Columbia University from 2012-13 and faculty member at the University of Michigan from 2006-12. He also served as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. A Ph.D. graduate from Princeton, Wherry completed his B.A. at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. An economic and cultural sociologist, his research explores domestic and global investigations of money, value and social life.