Lee Rainwater
(January 7, 1928 – July 4, 2015)
This lecture series, launched in 2017, is in honor of Lee Rainwater — our colleague, coauthor, mentor, and friend. The series recognizes Lee’s brilliant and creative academic career as well as his role as founding research director of the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS).
The series features an annual lecture by speakers selected by a committee comprised of the series’ donors. The location of the lectures alternates between Harvard University, where Lee spent much of his career, and the Stone Center at the Graduate Center, CUNY, which houses the US Office of LIS.
The series aims to highlight new research within the many substantive areas where Lee made profound intellectual contributions, including poverty, inequality, urban culture, and social policy, and spans both American and cross-national studies. To honor Lee’s remarkable career trajectory, the series includes scholars who use an array and mix of methods — theoretical, qualitative/ethnographic, and quantitative — and who have backgrounds in a range of disciplines, including sociology, economics, political science, and policy studies. In short, we intend to include scholars whose work captures “all of Lee,” from Behind Ghetto Walls and What Money Buys to, thirty years later, Poor Kids in a Rich Country and Wealth and Welfare States — and countless contributions in between. Invited lecturers will be chosen to reflect a diversity of backgrounds.
On April 6, 2017, the Swedish sociologist Robert Erikson delivered the first lecture in the series, titled “Social Selection in Education and its Consequences for Mobility.” The inaugural lecture, presented at Harvard University, was jointly hosted by the Stone Center and the Harvard Sociology Department.
The second lecture was presented at the Graduate Center on September 20, 2018, by Kathryn Edin, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University. Edin, a sociologist and one of the nation’s leading experts on the lives of low-income women, men, and children, delivered a lecture titled “The Tenuous Ties of Working Class Men.”
The third lecture took place on September 29, 2022, at Harvard. The lecture, “Slavery and Genocide: Jamaica, the U.S. South, and the Demography of Evil, 1650–1830,” was delivered by Orlando Patterson, the John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University.
The series is administered by Janet Gornick and Tim Smeeding.
The founding donors:
- The Rainwater Family
- Tim Smeeding and Marcy Carlson
- Janet Gornick
- Irv Garfinkel and Sara McLanahan
- Christopher Jencks
- Herbert J. Gans
- Gerald and Ruth Handel
- Tony and Judith Atkinson
- Markus Jäntti
- Koen Vleminckx and Ann Verboven
- Andrea Brandolini and Luisa Minghetti
- LIS: Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg
- The CUNY Graduate Center Sociology Program
- The Harvard Sociology Department (donation of space)
Further contributions will always be welcomed.
Please contact Janet Gornick or Tim Smeeding.