Elijah Anderson, the Sterling Professor of Sociology and of Black Studies at Yale University, has received the 2025 Edwin H. Sutherland Award from the American Society of Criminology for his outstanding ethnographic research into city life and the origins of urban crime in the United States.
Dr. Anderson has studied inequality, structural racism, and crime and violence for nearly five decades. As a doctoral student in the 1970s, he began examining street corner life at a local bar/liquor store located on Chicago’s South Side for his dissertation. He visited the same location nightly for nearly three years to gain a deeper understanding of the group of Black men he met there. This qualitative fieldwork provided the basis for his widely acclaimed first book, A Place on the Corner: A Study of Black Street Corner Men (University of Chicago Press, 1979), which vividly depicts how the men he observed maintained their social status in the eyes of the others, revealing a complex social order regulated in part by violence.
Since then, Dr. Anderson has authored four other books on the cultural history of the nation’s urban landscape. His most recent monograph, Black in White Space: The Enduring Impact of Color in Everyday Life (University of Chicago Press, 2022), sheds light on how symbolic racism makes all Black people uniquely vulnerable to implicit bias and racial discrimination across the United States.
Before joining the Yale faculty in 2007, Dr. Anderson taught sociology at the University of Pennsylvania for three decades. He has served on the board of directors of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and is a former vice president of the American Sociological Association.
A graduate of Indiana University, Dr. Anderson earned his master’s degree in sociology from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. in sociology from Northwestern University.
