Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Evicted” Matt Desmond to speak April 19

Harvard University Social Sciences Professor Matthew Desmond, whose book Evicted was just awarded the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, will speak on the Furman University campus Wednesday, April 19 at 7 p.m. in Watkins Room of the Trone Student Center.

Desmond’s talk is based on his book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, and is free and open to the public. The Cultural Life Program event is sponsored by the Furman Department of Sociology, Furman Poverty Studies Minor, and United Ministries of Greenville.

Desmond’s “Evicted” just won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.

Desmond is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences and codirector of the Justice and Poverty Project. After receiving his Ph.D. in 2010 from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he joined the Harvard Society of Fellows as a Junior Fellow. His primary teaching and research interests include urban sociology, poverty, race and ethnicity, organizations and work, social theory, and ethnography.

Desmond is the author of four books: On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters (2007), Race in America (with Mustafa Emirbayer, 2015), The Racial Order (with Mustafa Emirbayer, 2015), and Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016). He also is the editor of the inaugural issue of RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Severe Deprivation in America, Volumes 1 & 2 (2015).

Desmond has written essays on educational inequality, dangerous work, political ideology, race and social theory, and the inner-city housing market. Recently, he has published on the prevalence and consequences of eviction and the low-income rental market, network-based survival strategies among the urban poor, and the consequences of new crime control policies on inner-city women in the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Social Forces, and Demography.

Desmond is the principal investigator of the Milwaukee Area Renters Study, an original survey of tenants in Milwaukee’s low-income private housing sector. His work has been supported by the Ford, Russell Sage, and National Science Foundations, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times and Chicago Tribune. In 2015, Desmond was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” grant.

In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Evicted has garnered other recognitions: New York Times Bestseller; Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction Finalist; longlisted for the Pen/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction; and was named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, The New Yorker, Bloomberg, Esquire and many others.

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