Shamus Khan, Ph.D.

Title
Willard Thorp Professor of Sociology and American Studies | Graduate Director
Affiliation
Princeton University

Shamus Khan is Willard Thorp Professor of Sociology and American Studies at Princeton University. He writes on culture, inequality, gender, and elites. He is the author of over 100 articles, books, and essays, including Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School (Princeton), The Practice of Research (Oxford, with Dana Fisher), Approaches to Ethnography: Modes of Representation and Analysis in Participant Observation (Oxford, with Colin Jerolmack), and Sexual Citizens: Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus (W.W. Norton, with Jennifer Hirsch), which was named a best book of 2020 by NPR. He was a co-principal investigator of SHIFT, a multi-year study of sexual health and sexual violence at Columbia University. He directed the working group on the political influence of economic elites at the Russell Sage Foundation, is the series editor of “The Middle Range” at Columbia University Press, and served as the editor of the journal Public Culture. He writes regularly for the popular press such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and has served as a columnist for Time Magazine. In 2016 he was awarded Columbia University’s highest teaching honor, the Presidential Teaching Award, and in 2018 he was awarded the Hans L. Zetterberg Prize from Upsala University for “the best sociologist under 40”.