Richard Alba

Curriculum Vitae

Recent Publications

Current Projects

 

Contact
ralba@gc.cuny.edu; (212)-817-8773
The Graduate Center at CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue, Room 6202
New York, NY 10016

The seeds of Richard Alba’s interest in immigration, race and ethnicity were sown during his childhood in the Bronx of the 1940s and 1950s and nurtured intellectually at Columbia University, where he received his undergraduate and graduate education, completing his Ph.D. in 1974. He taught for three decades at the State University of New York campus in Albany, before coming to the Graduate Center in 2008.

In his teaching and research, he emphasizes a comparative perspective, and he has done research in France and in Germany, as well as the U.S., with the support of Fulbright grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the German Marshall Fund, and Russell Sage Foundation.  His books include Ethnic Identity:  The Transformation of White America (1990); Italian Americans:  Into the Twilight of Ethnicity (1985); and Remaking the American Mainstream:  Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration (2003), co-written with Victor Nee; and, most recently, Blurring the Color Line:  The New Chance for a More Integrated America (September, 2009).  Remaking the American Mainstream garnered the 2004 Thomas & Znaniecki Book Award from the International Migration section of the American Sociological Association and the 2005 Mirra Komarovsky Award of Eastern Sociological Society.  It was also the Honorable Mention for the 2003 Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Award in Sociology & Anthropology of the Association of American Publishers.

He has been elected President of the Eastern Sociological Society (1997-98) and Vice President of the American Sociological Association (2000-01).  In 2008, he received the Award for a Distinguished Career of Scholarship, bestowed by the International Migration section of the American Sociological Association.