Academic
Stephen Steinberg, a sociologist, is an internationally renowned
authority on race and ethnicity in the United States. His most recent book is Race
Relations: A Critique (Stanford University Press, September 2007). His last
book, Turning
Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (Beacon
Press, 1995), was included in Choice Magazine’s 1996 list of Outstanding
Academic Books, and received the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished
Anti-Racist Scholarship. His previous work, The Ethnic Myth, is widely
recognized as one of the leading critical interpretations of race, ethnicity,
and class in America. Other books include The Academic Melting Pot and The
Tenacity of Prejudice.. In a recent paper he challenged the myth of concentrated
poverty, an idea that has been used to justify HOPE VI and other "dispersal
policies" that have demolished public housing in urban neighborhoods ripe for
gentrification.("The
Myth of Concentrated Poverty" in The Integration Debate: Competing Futures for
American Cities, Ed. by Chester Hartman and Gregory D. Squires, New York: Routledge,
2010.
Steinberg teaches courses on Racial and Ethnic Groups in Urban America and Race,
Ethnicity, and Public Policy. He also teaches the required graduate and
undergraduate course on Urban Research Methods, an innovative course that
emphasizes the development of critical skills in reading and interpreting social
science research. His interest in improving the quality of student research
and writing is reflected in a book that he co-authored with Sharon Friedman, Writing
and Thinking in the Social Sciences (Prentice-Hall, 1989).
