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Alice Goffman
Alice Goffman (born 1982) is an American sociologist, urban ethnographer, and author. She was assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and visiting assistant professor of sociology at Pomona College. She is known for the controversy that resulted from the publication of her 2014 book On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City.
Born in 1982, both of Alice Goffman's parents, who were Canadian immigrants to the United States, were social scientists. Her father was the famed sociologist Erving Goffman, while her mother, Gillian Sankoff, is a sociolinguist. Erving Goffman died from stomach cancer in 1982, soon after Alice's birth. In 1993, her mother married the sociolinguist William Labov, who later legally adopted Alice.
Goffman attended The Baldwin School, a private school for girls in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. She earned a BA at the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD at Princeton University, both in sociology. Her doctoral dissertation committee was chaired by Mitchell Duneier and included Paul DiMaggio, Devah Pager, Cornel West, and Viviana Zelizer.
While earning her PhD at Princeton, Goffman co-taught undergraduate courses with Mitch Duneier as a Lloyd Cotsen Graduate Teaching Fellow. In 2010, she was awarded a two-year fellowship at the University of Michigan as a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar.
Beginning in the fall of 2012, Goffman taught both undergraduate and graduate level courses as an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. At UW Madison, she established the Wisconsin Collective for Ethnographic Research with a colleague and served on several committees. She has served as a reviewer and board member for several different sociological publications.
In 2014, Goffman published On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, an ethnographic account of her fieldwork on the impact of policing on the lives of young black men in Northeast Philadelphia. Since the publication of On the Run, Goffman has delivered talks at dozens of colleges, universities, and conferences. In 2015, she gave a TED Talk titled "How we’re priming some kids for college—and others for prison." That same year, she was accepted to the one-year fellowship program at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
In April 2017, after she was offered a position as a visiting professor at Pomona College, an anonymously authored open letter was written calling for Goffman's appointment to be rescinded due to allegations of racism in her work and research methods. The offer was not rescinded.
In 2019, she was denied tenure at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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Alice Goffman
Alice Goffman (born 1982) is an American sociologist, urban ethnographer, and author. She was assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and visiting assistant professor of sociology at Pomona College. She is known for the controversy that resulted from the publication of her 2014 book On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City.
Born in 1982, both of Alice Goffman's parents, who were Canadian immigrants to the United States, were social scientists. Her father was the famed sociologist Erving Goffman, while her mother, Gillian Sankoff, is a sociolinguist. Erving Goffman died from stomach cancer in 1982, soon after Alice's birth. In 1993, her mother married the sociolinguist William Labov, who later legally adopted Alice.
Goffman attended The Baldwin School, a private school for girls in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. She earned a BA at the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD at Princeton University, both in sociology. Her doctoral dissertation committee was chaired by Mitchell Duneier and included Paul DiMaggio, Devah Pager, Cornel West, and Viviana Zelizer.
While earning her PhD at Princeton, Goffman co-taught undergraduate courses with Mitch Duneier as a Lloyd Cotsen Graduate Teaching Fellow. In 2010, she was awarded a two-year fellowship at the University of Michigan as a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar.
Beginning in the fall of 2012, Goffman taught both undergraduate and graduate level courses as an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. At UW Madison, she established the Wisconsin Collective for Ethnographic Research with a colleague and served on several committees. She has served as a reviewer and board member for several different sociological publications.
In 2014, Goffman published On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, an ethnographic account of her fieldwork on the impact of policing on the lives of young black men in Northeast Philadelphia. Since the publication of On the Run, Goffman has delivered talks at dozens of colleges, universities, and conferences. In 2015, she gave a TED Talk titled "How we’re priming some kids for college—and others for prison." That same year, she was accepted to the one-year fellowship program at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
In April 2017, after she was offered a position as a visiting professor at Pomona College, an anonymously authored open letter was written calling for Goffman's appointment to be rescinded due to allegations of racism in her work and research methods. The offer was not rescinded.
In 2019, she was denied tenure at University of Wisconsin-Madison.