Dalton Conley

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dalton Clark Conley (b. 1969) is an American sociologist. He is University Professor of the Social Sciences and the Chair of the Department of Sociology at New York University. He also holds appointments at NYU's Wagner School of Public Service, as an Adjunct Professor of Community Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and as a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). In 2005, Conley became the first sociologist to win the National Science Foundation's Alan T. Waterman Award.

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

He has also studied the role of health in the status attainment process. A seminal article entitled, "Is Biology Destiny: Birth Weight and Life Chances" (with Neil G. Bennett, American Sociological Review 1999) and his second book, which emerged from this and related pieces, The Starting Gate: Birth Weight and Life Chances (with Kate Strully and Neil G. Bennett, 2003) showed the importance of perinatal health to later socioeconomic outcomes, reversing the typical way sociologists viewed the health-economics relationship and anticipated a robust research literature on early life health conditions as they affect later socioeconomic processes and outcomes.

The Pecking Order, which followed in 2004, showed the importance of within-family, ascriptive factors in determining sibling differences in socioeconomic success, thereby challenging the usual association of intra-household differences with the greater salience of achievement and/or meritocracy.

In addition to these works, Conley is the author of the acclaimed sociological memoir Honky (2001), which examines Conley's own childhood growing up white in the inner city projects of New York City. Vivid and richly insightful, Honky explores the intersection of race and class in America, outlining the subtle but profoundly important privileges even an impoverished white boy enjoys over his darker-skinned peers.

Conley's work has also appeared in Salon.com, Feed Magazine and other outlets. He has written several op-ed pieces for the New York Times and is frequently interviewed for articles on race, family, and socioeconomic status. Before earning a Ph.D. in Sociology and a M.A. in Public Policy from Columbia University, Conley earned a B.A. in Humanities from the University of California, Berkeley. He is married to Natalie Jeremijenko and has two children.