Book Talk | Paul Starr | American Contradiction: Revolution and Revenge from the 1950s to Now

Join the Institute for Public Knowledge on Monday, November 3 (5:30-7:00 PM) for an event with Paul Starr. He will discuss his book American Contradiction: Revolution and Revenge from the 1950s to Now with Maria Abascal and Tom Sugrue.

Paul Starr is professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University and founding coeditor of the American Prospect magazine. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction and Bancroft Prize in American History for The Social Transformation of American Medicine. Over a half-century he has written essays and op‑eds for newspapers and magazines as well as books on America’s institutions, history, and politics.

Maria Abascal is an Associate Professor of Sociology at New York University. She received her PhD in Sociology and Social Policy from Princeton University, and completed a postdoc in the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University. Broadly, she is interested in intergroup relations and boundary processes, especially as they pertain to race, ethnicity, and nationalism. Most of her research explores the impact of demographic diversification—real and perceived—on intergroup relations in the United States. She draws on a range of quantitative methods and data sources, including original lab, survey, and field experiments. Ongoing projects examine the relationship between racial/ethnic diversity and cooperation, boundary-drawing in the wake of diversification, and lay understandings of “diversity.”

Thomas J. Sugrue is Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History and the founding Director of Cities Collaborative at New York University.  He is author of four books, including Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North, and editor of five others. He has contributed to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the London Review of Books, The Nation, and Salon. He is a frequent commentator on modern American history, politics, civil rights, and urban policy. Sugrue has given over 450 public lectures throughout the United States and in Argentina, Canada, England, France, Germany, and Japan.