Dalton Conley
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
1969 (age 56–57)
Columbia University (MPA, PhD)
New York University (MS, PhD)
Dalton Conley | |
|---|---|
 Conley in 2015 | |
| Born | Dalton Clark Conley 1969 (age 56–57) |
| Education | University of California, Berkeley (BA) Columbia University (MPA, PhD) New York University (MS, PhD) |
Dalton Clark Conley (born 1969) is an American sociologist. He is a professor at Princeton University and has several books, including a memoir and a sociology textbook.
Conley attended Stuyvesant High School. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a BA in humanities and from Columbia University with an MPA in public policy and a PhD in sociology. He also holds an MS and PhD in biology (genomics) from NYU.[1]
Career
Conley is best known for his contributions to understanding how health and socioeconomic status are transmitted across generations.[2] His first book, Being Black, Living in the Red (1999), focuses on the role of family wealth in perpetuating class advantages and racial inequalities in the post-civil rights era.[3]
His second book, the memoir Honky (2000), examines Conley's childhood growing up White in an inner-city neighborhood of housing projects in New York City.[4][5]
Conley has studied the role of health in the status-attainment process. An article, "Is Biology Destiny: Birth Weight and Life Chances" (with Neil G. Bennett, American Sociological Review, 1999), and his third book, The Starting Gate: Birth Weight and Life Chances (with Kate Strully and Neil G. Bennett, 2003), addressed the importance of birth weight and prenatal health to later socioeconomic outcomes.[6] Conley's next book, The Pecking Order, which followed in 2004, argued for the importance of within-family factors in determining sibling differences in socioeconomic success.[7]
In 2008, Conley published the introductory sociology textbook You May Ask Yourself, which is set to be reissued in its eigth edition in late 2026.[8]
His subsequent book, Elsewhere, U.S.A., published in 2009, describes changes in American work–life attitudes and social ethics in the information economy.[9] In 2014, he published the satirical book Parentology: Everything You Wanted to Know About the Science of Raising Children but Were Too Exhausted to Ask, using his own parenting decisions as examples.[10][11]
In 2017, Conley published The Genome Factor, co-authored with Jason Fletcher. This book discusses the nature versus nurture debate and the influence of genes on social life.[12]
In 2025, he published The Social Genome: The New Science of Nature and Nurture.[13]
Conley is the Henry Putnam University Professor of Sociology at Princeton University.[14]
Recognition
- CAREER Award, National Science Foundation (2001).[15]
- Alan T. Waterman Award, National Science Foundation (2005).[16]
- Elected to the Council on Foreign Relations (2007).[17]
- Guggenheim Fellow (2011).[18]
- Otis Dudley Duncan Award, American Sociological Association (2018).[19]
Personal life
Conley is married to the Bosnian-American astrophysicist Tea Temim, with whom he has a child. He also has two children from a previous marriage, to Natalie Jeremijenko.[20][21][22]
