Barbara J. Risman Ph.D.

Barbara J. Risman, Ph.D. is College of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Editor of the international journal, Gender & Society. She will be a Visiting Fellow at the Sciences Po, Paris, France in the fall of 2024. She has previously been a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University, United Kingdom, a Visiting Professor at the University of Valencia, Trento University in Italy, and the VU University in Amsterdam. She was formerly a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She has published widely for decades about gender and families in academic journals. The third edition of her edited textbook, Families as They Really Are (now co-edited with Virginia Rutter and Kristi Williiams) is forthcoming in fall of 2023 and is used in classrooms across America. Her book Where the Millennials Will Take Us: A New Generation Wrestles with the Gender Structure was published in 2018, as was the Handbook on the Sociology of Gender (co-edited with Carissa Froyum Roisse and William Scarborough). Risman is a public intellectual whose editorials have appeared widely including in the Chicago Tribune, The Raleigh News & Observer, the Seattle Times, and cnn.com. She is quoted frequently in the the popular press, including the Economist, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and the Atlantic. Her awards include the 2011 American Sociological Association’s Award for the Public Understanding of Sociology and the 2005 Katherine Jocher Belle Boone Award from the Southern Sociological Society for lifetime contributions to the study of gender. Risman currently serves on the Board of Directors of The Council on Contemporary Families and the National Chapter Advisory Board of the Scholars Strategy Network. In 2016, she was President of the Southern Sociological Society and Vice-President of the American Sociological Association.