Claude S. Fischer is Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.
Fischer arrived at Berkeley in 1972 with degrees from UCLA and Harvard. Most of his early research focused on the social psychology of urban life—how and why rural and urban experiences differ—and on social networks, both interests coming together in three early books: The Urban Experience (1976, 1984); Networks and Places: Social Relations in the Urban Setting (1977), and To Dwell Among Friends: Personal Networks in Town and City (1982). His most recent research monograph, on social networks, was published in 2011: Still Connected: Family and Friends in America Since 1970. His latest publications largely report findings from the UCNets project (see here), a multi-wave survey of people’s personal family and friendship networks.
Previously, Fischer has conducted research on American social history, beginning with a study of the early telephone’s place in social life, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (1992); moving on to a statistical study, with Michael Hout, of transformations in American society over the twentieth century, Century of Difference: How America Changed in the Last One Hundred Years (2006); and culminating with Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character (2010), which analyzes American social, cultural, and psychological developments since the colonial era.
Along the way, Fischer has worked on other topics, including writing a book on inequality with five Berkeley colleagues, Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth (1996). A collection of essays from his Boston Review columns appeared in 2014 as Lurching Toward Happiness in America (MIT Press).
Fischer was the founding editor of Contexts, the American Sociological Association’s magazine of sociology for the general reader, and edited it through 2004. In 2011, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; in 2015, made a David Riesman Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science; and in 2017, elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Fischer lives in Berkeley with his wife, Ann Swidler, also Professor of the Graduate School in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and member of the AAAS.
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MADE IN AMERICA 