Jonathan Rieder

Jonathan Rieder came to Barnard from Yale in 1989 and served as chair of the Barnard Sociology department from 1989 to 2004. His scholarly research spans the areas of sociology of culture; race, pluralism and ethnicity in the United States; and politics and language. The author of Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism and the editor of The Fractious Nation: Unity and Division in Contemporary American Life, he is completing a book on the social organization of moral argument that focuses on Martin Luther King, Jr. as a crossover artist who defined a new vision of citizenship as he shifted between performances of "white" and "black" talk. Between 1995 and 2001, he was the founding Co-Editor of CommonQuest: The Magazine of Black-Jewish Relations, which won national acclaim for the fresh way it explored a broad array of racial, ethnic and religious conflicts in the United States and beyond. He has been a contributing editor of The New Republic and is a regular contributor to the New York Sunday Times Book Review. His teaching interests include the sociology of culture; race, culture and identity; unity and division in the United States; culture in contemporary America; politics and culture; and sociology theory.