Philip Kasinitz

Philip Kasinitz (born September 18, 1957) is an American sociologist. He is currently a Presidential Professor of Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center where he has chaired the doctoral program in Sociology since 2001.

Kasinitz graduated Boston University in 1979 and earned his doctorate from New York University in 1987, where he studied primarily with Richard Sennett and Dennis Wrong. He specializes in immigration, ethnicity, race relations, urban social life and the nature of contemporary cities. Much of his work focuses on New York. He is the author of Caribbean New York for which he won the Thomas and Znaniecki Book Award in 1996. His co-authored book Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age won the Eastern Sociological Society’s Mirra Komarovsky Book Award in 2009 and the American Sociological Association Distinguished Scholarly Book Award in 2010.

Kasinitz served as the President of the Eastern Sociological Society in 2007-2008 and was awarded the Society’s “Merritt” Award for career contributions in 2015. Since 2005 has been the book review editor of the ESS journal, Sociological Forum. He is a member of the Historical Advisory Board of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation and a former member of the Social Science Research Council’s Committee on International Migration and the Russell Sage Foundation’s committee to study the social effects of 9-11 on New York City.

Kasinitz is frequently quoted in media venues and his work has appeared in CNN On Line, New York Newsday; Dissent; The Nation; The Wall Street Journal; Lingua Franca, and Telos as well as in numerous academic journals. Prior to coming to the CUNY Graduate Center, Kasinitz taught at Williams College. He has held visiting appointments at Princeton University, The University of Amsterdam and the Technical University of Berlin.

Selected publications

• Global Cities, Local Streets (with Sharon Zukin and Xiangming Chen), Routledge, 2015.
• The Urban Ethnography Reader (co-edited with Mitchell Duneier and Alexandra Murphy), Oxford University Press, 2013.
• Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age (with John Mollenkopf, Mary C. Waters, and Jennifer Holdaway), Harvard University Press and Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2008.
• Becoming New Yorkers: Ethnographies of the New Second Generation (co-edited with Mary C. Waters and John H. Mollenkopf), Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2004.
• The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience (with Charles Hirschman and Josh Dewind), Russell Sage Foundation, 1999.
• Metropolis: Center and Symbol of Our Times, London: MacMillan Ltd. and New York University Press, 1995.
• Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race, Cornell University Press, 1992.