Current Research

Note to Prospective Students

Graduate Students

Curriculum Vitae

Teaching

Mary C. Waters

M.E. Zukerman Professor of Sociology

Biographical Note

MARY C. WATERS is the M.E. Zukerman Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. She specializes in the study of immigration, inter-group relations, the formation of racial and ethnic identity among the children of immigrants, and the challenges of measuring race and ethnicity.

Waters received a B.A. in Philosophy from Johns Hopkins University in 1978, an M.A. in Demography (1981) and an M.A. (1983) and PhD in Sociology (1986) from the University of California at Berkeley. She has taught at Harvard University since 1986, and was chair of the Sociology Department from 2001-2005.

She is the author of the forthcoming books, Inheriting the City: The Second Generation Comes of Age (with Jennifer Holdaway, Philip Kasinitz, and John Mollenkopf), (Harvard University and Russell Sage Press); and The New Americans: A Guide to Immigration Since 1965 (with Reed Ueda and Helen Marrow), (Harvard University Press, 2007). She is also author of Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities (Harvard University Press, 1999, paper ed. 2001). This book won five scholarly awards including the Mira Komarovsky Award of the Eastern Sociological Society, the Otis Dudley Duncan Award of the Population Section of the American Sociological Association, the Thomas and Znaniecki Award of the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association, the Best Book Award of the Section on Race and Urban Politics of the American Political Science Association, and the Best Book Award of the Center for the Study of Inequality of Cornell University. Her other books include Becoming New Yorkers: Ethnographies of the New Second Generation (co-edited with Phillip Kasinitz and John Mollenkopf) (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2004), Social Inequalities in Comparative Perspective co-edited with Fiona Devine) (Blackwell Press, 2004), The New Race Question: How the Census Counts Multiracial Individuals (co-edited with Joel Perlmann) (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2002, paper 2005), The Changing Face of Home: The Transnational Lives of the Second Generation (co-edited with Peggy Levitt) (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2002), Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (University of California Press, 1990) and From Many Strands: Ethnic and Racial Groups in Contemporary America (with Stanley Lieberson) (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 1988). She is also the author of over 40 articles and chapters on racial and ethnic identity and immigrant assimilation.

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Waters’ work has been supported by the Russell Sage, Rockefeller, Ford, Mellon, W.T. Grant, and MacArthur Foundations as well as by the Foundation for Child Development and the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She was elected to membership in the Sociological Research Association in 1993. In 2003-2004 she was named a Walter Channing Cabot Faculty Fellow for “eminence in history, literature or art," in 2005 she was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society, and in 2006 she was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Waters has won wide recognition for her teaching and advising, including six prizes for undergraduate teaching. She was named a Harvard College Professor 1999-2004 to honor excellence in teaching. She was director of the Undergraduate Program in Sociology from 1993-2001. Her lecture for graduate students “Teaching, Research and Having a Life” is a popular video at the Derek Bok Center for Teaching at Harvard University. She teaches courses on research methods, immigration and ethnicity, race and ethnic relations and American society and public policy.

Waters has testified twice before congress on how the census should measure racial and ethnic identity. She served on the Advisory Board to the U.S. Census as a representative of the Population Association of America from 1999-2005, she has served as a member of the study section of the National Institute of Child Health and Development, and has served as a member of the Committee on the Impact of International Migration of the National Academy of Science, and as a consultant to the Census Bureau. She is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Russell Sage Foundation, an elected member of the Board of Directors of the Population Association of America, and is a member of the International Migration Committee and the Research on Katrina Advisory Committee of the Social Science Research Council. Since 2001 she has been a member of the MacArthur Network on the Transition to Adulthood. She has held numerous elected offices and served on committees of the American Sociological Association and the Eastern Sociological Society. She is currently on the editorial boards of six publications, including the Annual Review of Sociology.

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At Harvard Waters has served as an elected member of the Faculty Council, and as a member of the Committees on Ethnic Studies, Social Studies, Social Policy, Womens Studies, Undergraduate Education, Graduate Education, Public Service, the Native American Program, the Board of Syndics of Harvard University Press, and the Task Force on General Education. She is currently a member of the Oversight Committee of the Robert Wood Johnson Post Doctoral Program, and the Executive Committee of the Program on the Global Demography of Aging at the Harvard School of Public Health. She is faculty advisor to numerous student groups and has run a Graduate Workshop on International Migration for the last five years. This workshop attracts students from Harvard’s many graduate and professional schools and the surrounding academic community to share ongoing research in the area of international migration.

During 2007-2008 Waters is the Hallsworth Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester, where she co-directed the Harvard Manchester Summer Workshop on Immigration for graduate students from the United States and the United Kingdom.

Note to Prospective Students

It is not possible for me to respond individually to all of the email and phone inquiries I get about our graduate program. And because we get hundreds of applicants to our program it is not possible for me to meet with prospective students before they have been accepted. I am sorry about that. I continue to work with new students interested in immigration, race and ethnicity, intergroup relations, and social stratification, as well as other questions which may be even further from my own research. So I do encourage you to apply to our graduate program if it looks like a good fit to you. The best way for you to judge the kinds of work in our department is to look at what current and former graduate students who have worked with me have accomplished. The list is here. If you apply and are accepted into the program we will have a chance to meet and talk about your interests in the spring before you have to decide on a graduate program. I wish you good luck in the application process.

CURRENT RESEARCH

The New York Second Generation Project focuses on the lives of young adults in New York City whose parents came from Latin America, China, and the Caribbean, based on analysis of a large survey, in-depth life history interviews and ethnographic observations. The study examines the socioeconomic, cultural, and social adjustments of the new second generation. This is a joint project with sociologist Philip Kaisnitz and political scientists John Mollenkopf and Jennifer Holdaway.

Coming of Age in America is a cross site qualitative study of the transition to adulthood in a number of different communities across the United States. This study asks how young people are leaving home, finishing education, finding work, choosing life partners, and becoming parents, given the documented extension of the period of young adulthood and the increasing variety in the timing and sequencing of these events among young people today. The study examines the lives of young adults in New York, San Diego, Minneapolis, Detroit and rural Iowa. This project is a joint one with sociologists Patrick Carr, Maria Kefalas, and political scientist Jennifer Holdaway and is part of the MacArthur Network on the Transition to Adulthood.

Katrina and Its Aftermath in the Lives of Community College Students. This project, funded by the National Science Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation follows a group of community college students who were part of a longitudinal study on young adulthood in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005. In the summer of 2006 we will be re-interviewing members of the panel study to see how this disaster has affected their lives and their long term goals and what kinds of supports or hurdles this disruption has created in their lives. This is a joint project with psychologist Jean Rhodes and economists Christina Paxson and Cecelia Rouse, and with Tom Brock and colleagues at MDRC in New York.

The Second Generation in Europe and the United States. There are two aspects to this project. In 2004 researchers studying the second generation in various European countries and in the United States came together at Radcliffe for a conference to compare approaches to studying this phenomenon and research findings. This will result in a book, The Next Generation: Children of Immigrants in Europe and North America (co-edited with Richard Alba). The second part of the project is a National Science Foundation and Nuffield Foundation funded project on children of immigrants in schools in Europe and the United States. This project, headed by Richard Alba and Jennifer Holdaway pairs American and European researchers to study the ways in which national differences in education systems affect student attainment and economic and civic integration for children of immigrants. The project covers France, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Britain. Waters and sociologist Anthony Heath of Oxford University head the U.S. Britain comparison, which involves comparative research on the educational experiences of the second generation in Britain and the US, and the exchange of post doctoral and pre-doctoral scholars between Harvard and Oxford.

Mary Waters grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, New York, the eldest of eight children. She attended Our Lady Help of Christians elementary school and graduated from Saint Savior High School in 1975. She developed her interest in immigration and ethnicity by listening to the stories of her immigrant grandparents and because of the importance of ethnicity and race in day to day life in Brooklyn. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband Ric, and their three children, Katie, age 11, Harry, age 9 and Maggie, age 6.

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10/02/2007

Curriculum Vitae

Courses Offered This Academic Year

A Sampling of Courses Offered in Other Years

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Photo by Kris Snibbe / Harvard News Office.

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540 William James Hall
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Office Hours

Monday 2-4pm by appointment

Staff Contact

Dorothy Friendly