Nancy Foner

Nancy Foner

Fellow: Awarded 2017
Field of Study: Sociology

Competition: US & Canada

Nancy Foner is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Her work on immigration has a strong comparative focus – comparing immigration today with earlier periods in the United States and immigrant minorities in the United States and Europe. She has written extensively on immigration to New York City past and present, as well as Jamaican migration to New York and London, especially on issues of race and ethnicity, gender, and family dynamics. Because immigration is a major source of change in the United States as well as in Europe, her work has been concerned with how immigration has reshaped the lives of immigrants and their children as well as the cities and countries where they have settled.

Foner is the author or editor of eighteen books, including the award-winning From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration (Yale University Press, 2000), In a New Land: A Comparative View of Immigration (NYU Press, 2005), and, most recently, Strangers No More: Immigration and the Challenges of Integration in North America and Western Europe (Princeton University Press, 2015) coauthored with Richard Alba.

Among her other activities, she was the 2014-15 President of the Eastern Sociological Society and a member of the National Academy of Sciences panel on the Integration of Immigrants into American Society. Her work has been honored in many ways. In 2010, she received the Distinguished Career Award from the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association, and in 2016, the inaugural Senior Scholar Award from the Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology. In 2011, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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