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 recently been focusing on immigration to New York City in the present and in the past. 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 immigration 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); 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); and Immigration Research for a New Century: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (edited with Ruben Rumbaut and Steven Gold, Russell Sage Foundation, 2000).

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).

Among her other activities, Nancy Foner is a member of the Social Science Research Council Committee on International Migration, the Russell Sage Foundation Immigration Research Advisory Committee, and the Statue of Liberty/Ellis Island History Advisory Committee. She has testified on immigration issues before several Congressional committees and serves on the editorial board of numerous journals, including International Migration Review and Global Networks. She is a past president of the Society for the Anthropology of Work and the Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology, and is currently an elected member of the Executive Board of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society.