Nancy Foner, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, received her B.A. from Brandeis University and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Her main area of interest is immigration. She has studied Jamaicans in their home society as well as in New York and London, nursing home workers in New York, and has written widely on immigration to New York City. She is particularly interested in the comparative study of immigration – comparing immigration today with earlier periods in the United States, the immigrant experience in various American gateway cities, and immigrant minorities in the United States and Europe.

Nancy Foner has thirteen books to her credit, including From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration (Yale University Press, 2000, winner of the 2000 Theodore Saloutos Award of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society); Not Just Black and White: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States  (edited with George Fredrickson, Russell Sage Foundation, 2004, Honorable Mention, Thomas and Znaniecki Distinguished Book Award of the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association);  New Immigrants in New York (Columbia University Press, revised edition, 2001); Islands in the City: West Indian Migration to New York (University of California Press, 2001);  Immigration Research for a New Century: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (edited with Ruben Rumbaut and Steven Gold, Russell Sage Foundation, 2000); and The Caregiving Dilemma: Work in an American Nursing Home (University of California Press, 1994).  

Her two most recent books are: Wounded City: The Social Impact of 9/11 (Russell Sage Foundation, 2005), an edited volume that is the product of a Russell Sage Foundation working group that she headed, and In a New Land: A Comparative View of Immigration (New York University Press, 2005).  She is also the author of more than 75 articles and book chapters.

Among her other activities, Foner is a member of the Russell Sage Foundation Immigration Research Advisory Committee, the Statue of Liberty/Ellis Island History Advisory Committee, and the Social Science Research Council Task Force on Hurricane Katrina Advisory Board. She has testified on immigration issues before several Congressional committees and serves on the editorial board of numerous journals, including International Migration Review, Global Networks, and the Journal of American Ethnic History.  She is currently chair of the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association, and is past president of the Society for the Anthropology of Work as well as the Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology.