Mary Pattillo

Professor of Sociology and African-American Studies
Faculty Associate, Institute for Policy Research
Northwestern University
PhD, Sociology, University of Chicago, 1997
m-pattillo@northwestern.edu
Curriculum Vitae

Mary Pattillo’s areas of interest include race and ethnicity (with an emphasis on class stratification), urban sociology, and qualitative methods. Her first book, Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class (University of Chicago Press, 1999) won the Oliver Cromwell Cox Best Book Award from the American Sociological Association. She is also co-editor of Imprisoning America: The Social Effects of Mass Incarceration (Russell Sage, 2004). Her most recent book, Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City (University of Chicago Press, 2007), examines conflict and consensus as one African American neighborhood deals with gentrification and the transformation of public housing.

Pattillo has published articles in American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and other journals. She is a founding board member of Urban Prep Charter Academy for Young Men in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood.

Selected Publications

Books

Pattillo, Mary. Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City (University of Chicago Press, 2007).

Pattillo, Mary, David Weiman, and Bruce Western, eds. Imprisoning America: The Social Effects of Mass Incarceration (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2004).

Pattillo, Mary. Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class (University of Chicago Press, 1999).

Journal Articles

Heflin, C. M., and M. Pattillo. Poverty in the family: Race, siblings and socioeconomic heterogeneity. Social Science Research (forthcoming).

Pattillo, M. 2005. Black middle-class neighborhoods. Annual Review of Sociology 31:305-29.

Pattillo, M. 2003. Extending the boundaries and definition of the ghetto. Ethnic and Racial Studies 26:1046-57.

Pattillo, Mary. 2003. Negotiating blackness, For richer or for poorer. Ethnography 4:61-93.