Matthew Desmond is the Maurice P. During Professor at Princeton University. His research focus primarily on poverty in America, city life, housing insecurity, public policy, racial inequality, and ethnography. In 2015, Desmond was awarded his MacArthur Genius Grant for “revealing the impact of eviction on the lives of the urban poor and its role in perpetuating racial and economic inequality.” In 2018, he received the Stowe Prize for Writing to Advance Social Justice, awarded by the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center to authors whose work shines a light on critical social issues.
Matthew has published four books, including Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the America City (2016), The Racial Order (with Mustafa Emirbayer) (2015), Race in America (with Mustafa Emirbayer) (2015), and On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters (2007). He is also a Contributing Writer for the New York Times Magazine. Evicted won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the National Books Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, the Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association, and the Barnes & Noble’s Discover New Writers Award.
In addition, Matthew is the principal investigator of Eviction Lab, a team of researchers dedicated to analyzing eviction in America. They have compiled a dataset on evictions to help us better understand the cause and effects of eviction. Desmond and his team believe that stable, affordable housing can be an effective platform to promote economic mobility, health, and community vitality. They hope their findings will inform programs to prevent eviction and family homelessness, raise awareness of the centrality of housing insecurity in the lives of low income families, and deepen our understanding of the fundamental drivers of poverty in America.
