Matthew Desmond, Ph.D.

Matthew Desmond, Ph.D. is the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. 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. He is the author of five books, including Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, which won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, the Carnegie Medal, and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. His newest book is 2023’s Poverty, by America, which builds a startlingly original and ambitious case for ending poverty.

The founding director of The Eviction Lab, Prof. Desmond’s research focuses on poverty in America, city life, housing insecurity, public policy, racial inequality, and ethnography. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award, and the William Julius Wilson Early Career Award. A contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, Prof. Desmond was listed in 2016 among the Politico 50, as one of “fifty people across the country who are most influencing the national political debate.”