Profile
Nancy Foner is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She received her BA from Brandeis University and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Her recent work focuses on comparing immigration in the U.S. today and in the past; immigrants in the U.S. and Europe; and how immigration has been remaking American society. She has written extensively on immigration to New York City as well as Jamaican migration to New York and London.
Foner is the author or editor of 20 books; the most recent is One Quarter of the Nation: Immigration and the Transformation of America (Princeton University Press, 2022). Her other books include From Ellis Island to JFK: New York's Two Great Waves of Immigration (Yale U Press, 2000, Theodore Saloutos Award, Immigration and Ethnic History Society); In a New Land: A Comparative View of Immigration (NYU Press, 2005, Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2006); Not Just Black and White: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States (ed. with George Fredrickson, Russell Sage Foundation, 2004, Honorable Mention, Thomas and Znaniecki Distinguished Book Award, ASA International Migration Section); One Out of Three: Immigrant New York in the Twenty-First Century (Columbia U Press, 2013); and Strangers No More: Immigration and the Challenges of Integration in North America and Western Europe (with Richard Alba, Princeton U Press, 2015, Honorable Mention, Distinguished Book Award, Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Section, International Studies Association and Honorable Mention, Thomas and Znaniecki Distinguished Book Award). Foner is also the author of more than 120 articles and book chapters.
Among her other activities, she was, for many years, a member of the Social Science Research Council Committee on International Migration and the Russell Sage Foundation Immigration Research Advisory Committee. More recently, she served on the National Academy of Sciences panel on the Integration of Immigrants into American Society. A former president of the Eastern Sociological Society, she also was chair of the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association as well as president of the Society for the Anthropology of Work and the Society for Urban, National, and Transnational Anthropology.
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; in 2016, the inaugural Senior Scholar Award from the Society for Urban, National and Transnational Anthropology; and in 2018 the Merit Award from the Eastern Sociological Society in recognition of outstanding contributions to the discipline, profession, and ESS. She was awarded a Berlin Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin (2017) and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (2017-18). In 2011, she was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
View or download Nancy Foner's CV.