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Maryland Population Research Center
2003-2004 Seminar Series

SPEAKER:	Bruce Western Professor of Sociology, Princeton University
TITLE:	"Economic Inequality and the American Prison Boom"**
DATE:	Friday May 7, 2004
TIME:	12:00 Noon
PLACE:	1101 Art-Sociology University of Maryland, College Park Campus
Bruce Western received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California -- Los Angeles in 1993. He then joined the faculty at Princeton University and became Professor of Sociology in 2000. He just concluded a year as a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. Dr. Western is currently on the editorial board of World Politics and a corresponding editor for Theory and Society, and has served as a guest editor of a special issue on Bayesian analysis for Sociological Methods and Research. Dr. Western's research falls within the broad topics of political and comparative sociology, stratification and inequality, and methodology. His methodological work focuses on the application of Bayesian statistics to research problems in sociology. His substantive research focuses on how institutions have shaped labor market outcomes. His book entitled Between Class and Market (Princeton, 1997) and related articles in the American Journal of Sociology, Annual Review of Political Science (with M. Wallerstein), and European Sociological Review (with K. Healy), examine the growth and decline of labor unions and their economic effects in the United States and Europe. A second stream of research, also related to the question of institutions and labor markets, identifies the impact of the American penal system on earnings inequality, and in particular the black-white earnings gap. His recent paper with Katherine Beckett, "How Unregulated is the U.S. Labor Market?" (American Journal of Sociology, 1999) recently received article prizes from the Law and Society Association, the Political Sociology section of the ASA, and the Fritz Thyssen Foundation for Essays in the Social Sciences in Germany.

**This Event is Co-Sponsored with Department of Economics

Please join us for this brown bag event. For the series schedule, please refer to http://www.popcenter.umd.edu/events/spring2004.shtml