Dalton Conley

Dalton Clark Conley (born 1969) is an American sociologist. Conley is a professor at Princeton University and has written eight books, including a memoir and a sociology textbook.

Dalton Conley
Born	Dalton Clark Conley 1969 (age 54–55)
Education	University of California, Berkeley (BA) Columbia University (MPA, PhD) New York University (MS, PhD)

Education

Conley attended Stuyvesant High School. He subsequently graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a B.A. in humanities and from Columbia University with an M.P.A. in public policy and a Ph.D. in sociology. He also holds an M.S. and Ph.D. in biology (genomics) from NYU.^[1]

Career

Conley is best known for his contributions to understanding how health and socioeconomic status are transmitted across generations.^[2] His first book, Being Black, Living in the Red (1999), focuses on the role of family wealth in perpetuating class advantages and racial inequalities in the post-Civil Rights era.^[3]

He has also studied the role of health in the status attainment process. An article, "Is Biology Destiny: Birth Weight and Life Chances" (with Neil G. Bennett, American Sociological Review 1999) and his second book, The Starting Gate: Birth Weight and Life Chances (with Kate Strully and Neil G. Bennett, 2003) addressed the importance of birth weight and prenatal health to later socioeconomic outcomes.^[4] Conley's next book, The Pecking Order, which followed in 2004, argued for the importance of within-family, ascriptive factors in determining sibling differences in socioeconomic success.^[5] Conley's subsequent book, Elsewhere, U.S.A., published in 2009, describes changes in American work-life attitudes and social ethics in the information economy.^[6] In 2014, he published the satirical book, Parentology: Everything You Wanted to Know About the Science of Raising Children but Were Too Exhausted to Ask, using his own parenting decisions as examples.^[7][8]

In 2017, Conley published The Genome Factor, co-authored with Jason Fletcher. This book discusses the nature versus nurture debate and the influence of genes on social life.^[9] Conley has also written an introductory sociology textbook, entitled You May Ask Yourself, currently in its 7th edition.^[10] He has also penned a memoir, Honky (2000) that examines Conley's own childhood growing up white in an inner-city neighborhood of housing projects of New York City.^[11]

Conley is the Henry Putnam University Professor of Sociology at Princeton University.^[12]

Selected Awards and Honors

• Elected Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science (2019).^[13]
• Elected Member, National Academy of Sciences (2018).^[14]
• Otis Dudley Duncan Award, American Sociological Association (2018).^[15]
• Elected Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2017).^[16]
• Guggenheim Fellow (2011).^[17]
• Elected to the Council on Foreign Relations (2007).^[18]
• Alan T. Waterman Award, National Science Foundation (2005).^[19]
• CAREER Award, National Science Foundation (2001).^[20]
• Investigator Award, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (1999).^[21]
• Dissertation Award, American Sociological Association (1997).^[22]

Personal life

Conley is married to the Bosnian-American astrophysicist Tea Temim with whom he has a child. He also has two children from a previous marriage: a daughter named E and a son named Yo Xing Heyno Augustus Eisner Alexander Weiser Knuckles Jeremijenko-Conley.^[23][24]

Works

• Being Black, Living in the Red. University of California Press. 1999. ISBN 978-0-520-21673-0.
• Honky. University of California Press. 2000. ISBN 0-520-21586-9.
• The Pecking Order. Random House. 2004. ISBN 978-0-375-71381-1.
• Elsewhere, U.S.A. Random House. 2009. ISBN 978-0-375-42290-4.
• You May Ask Yourself. W. W. Norton & Company. 2011. ISBN 978-0-393-12020-2.
• The Genome Factor. Princeton University Press. 2017. ISBN 978-0-691-16474-8., with Jason Fletcher

References

1. "Princeton University Sociology Faculty". Archived from the original on 2016-07-01.
2. "Dalton Conley - Princeton University Faculty Bio". 2016. Archived from the original on 2016-08-16.
3. Conley, Dalton (1999). Being Black, Living in the Red. University of California Press. ISBN 9780520261303.
4. Conley, Dalton (2003). The Starting Gate: Birth Weight and Life Chances. University of California Press. ISBN 9780520239555.
5. Conley, Dalton (2004). The Pecking Order: Which Siblings Succeed and Why. Pantheon. ISBN 0375421742.
6. Conley, Dalton (2009). Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety. Pantheon. ISBN 978-0375422904.
7. Conley, Dalton (2014). Parentology: Everything You Wanted to Know About the Science of Raising Children but Were Too Exhausted to Ask. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-1476712659.
8. "Parent Like a Mad Scientist". Time. 2014.
9. Conley, Dalton; Fletcher, Jason (24 January 2017). The Genome Factor - Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691164748.
10. Conley, Dalton (2015). You May Ask Yourself: An Introduction to Thinking Like a Sociologist. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0393937732.
11. Conley, Dalton (2000). Honky. University of California Press. ISBN 0520215869.
12. "Dalton Conley". Princeton University.
13. "AAAS Announces 2019 Fellows". 2019.
14. "News From the National Academy of Sciences".
15. "Population Section Award Recipients".
16. "American Academy Member Directory".
17. "Guggenheim Fellows".
18. "CFR Membership Roster".
19. "News from the NSF".
20. "NSF Announces CAREER Awardees".
21. "RWJF Investigator Award Bio".
22. "ASA Dissertation Awards by Year".
23. Bahrampour, Tara (25 September 2003). "A Boy Named Yo, Etc.; Name Changes, Both Practical and Fanciful, Are on the Rise". The New York Times. Retrieved 4 September 2012.
24. Conley, Dalton (10 June 2010). "Raising E and Yo..." Psychology Today. Retrieved 19 August 2016.

External links

• The Guardian profile of Honky