Book Talk | Benjamin Cornwell and Nan Feng | Friends and Fortunes: Social Capital Inequality in America
Join the Institute for Public Knowledge on Monday, April 13 (5:30-7:00 PM) for an event with Benjamin Cornwell and Nan Feng. They will discuss their new book, Friends and Fortunes: Social Capital Inequality in America, with BK Lee, moderated by Eric Klinenberg.
Benjamin Cornwell is a Professor of Sociology at Cornell University, where he recently served as Department chair. He has published two previous books, including Social Sequence Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and The Art and Science of Social Research (W. W. Norton, 2020), and over seventy research papers on topics relating to social networks, sequences, social disruption, elites, and social epidemiology. In 2017, the American Sociological Association awarded Cornwell the Leo Goodman Award for advances in research methods.
Nan Feng is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. She received a PhD in sociology from Cornell University in 2024. She studies how social networks shape inequality and are shaped by inequality. Her work employs innovative quantitative approaches to study complex data structures.
Dr. Byungkyu Lee is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at New York University. He received his PhD in Sociology from Columbia University and taught at Indiana University before joining NYU. He is actively working on multiple projects in three main research areas: the co-evolution of social networks, cultural beliefs, and political polarization; using causal inference, multilevel modeling and network analysis to examine how social contexts shape health status and behaviors; and studying the social consequences of crises and disasters, focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic.
Eric Klinenberg is Helen Gould Shepard Professor of Social Science and Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He is the author of 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed (Knopf, 2024), Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life (Crown, 2018), Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone (The Penguin Press, 2012), Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media (Metropolitan Books, 2007), and Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2002), and co-author, with Aziz Ansari, of the New York Times #1 bestseller Modern Romance (The Penguin Press, 2015). His scholarly work has been published in journals including the American Sociological Review, Theory and Society, and Ethnography, and he has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and This American Life.