Eric Klinenberg is Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the Social Sciences and Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He’s also research director for Rebuild by Design, and an affiliated faculty member of the Wagner School of Public Service and the Department of Media, Culture, and Communications.

Klinenberg’s most recent book, published in 2024, is 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed. In 2020, Klinenberg argues that crises have a way of revealing things. Who we are. What we value. Whose lives matter. At the heart of 2020 are seven vivid profiles of ordinary New Yorkers—including the leader of a mutual aid network, an elementary school principal, a bar manager, a subway custodian, and a local political aide—whose experiences illuminate how Americans, and people across the globe, reckoned with 2020. Through these poignant stories, we revisit our own moments of hope and fear, the profound tragedies and losses in our communities, the local projects that brought us together, and the social movements that hinted at the possibilities of a better world.

Eric Klinenberg vividly captures these stories, casting them against the backdrop of a high-stakes presidential election, a surge of misinformation, rising distrust, and raging protests. We move from the epicenter in New York City to Washington and London, where political leaders made the crisis so much more lethal than it had to be. We bear witness to epidemiological battles in Wuhan and Beijing, along with the initiatives of scientists, citizens, and policy makers in Australia, Japan, and Taiwan, who worked together to save lives.

In 2018, Klinenberg published Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life. The book, which has become a landmark text in urban studies, argues that the future of democratic societies rests not simply on shared values but on shared spaces: the libraries, childcare centers, bookstores, churches, synagogues, and parks where crucial, sometimes life-saving connections, are formed. Richly reported, elegantly written, and ultimately uplifting, Palaces for the People urges us to acknowledge the crucial role these spaces play in civic life. Our social infrastructure could be the key to bridging our seemingly unbridgeable divides—and safeguarding democracy.

In 2015, Klinenberg co-authored Modern Romance with the comedian Aziz Ansari. The book, a unique blend of humor and sociology, became the New York Times #1 bestseller and has been translated around the world. Klinenberg’s 2012 book, Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone, a sociological analysis of the greatest social change of the past sixty years that we have failed to name or identify. Critics have called Going Solo “trailblazing” (Vanity Fair), “fascinating” (Wall Street Journal), and “so important that it is likely to become both a popular read and a social science classic” (Psychology Today)

Klinenberg’s first book, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, won six scholarly and literary prizes and was praised as “a dense and subtle portrait” (Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker), “intellectually exciting” (Amartya Sen), and a “trenchant, persuasive tale of slow murder by public policy” (Salon). A theatrical adaptation of Heat Wave premiered in Chicago in 2008, and the documentary film adaptation, Cooked: Survival By Zipcode, came out in 2019.

Professor Klinenberg’s second book, Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media, examines the how media consolidation and the rise of the Internet have transformed culture, journalism, and democracy. Since its publication, he has testified before the Federal Communications Commission and briefed the U.S. Congress on his findings.

In addition to his books and scholarly articles, Klinenberg appears often on public radio and television, and he has contributed to popular publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Rolling Stone, and the radio program This American Life.

At NYU, Professor Klinenberg teaches courses on cities and climate change, as well as graduate seminars on research methods, ethnography, and urban design.