Wendy Roth

Associate Professor

PhD, Harvard University

Department of Sociology

Wendy Roth joined the department in 2006 after receiving her Doctorate in Sociology and Social Policy from Harvard University. Dr. Roth is a sociologist of race, ethnicity, and immigration with substantive interests in Latin America, transnational processes, multiracial populations and identities, and intersections of race and genomics. Her book, Race Migrations: Latinos and the Cultural Transformation of Race (Stanford University Press 2012) examines how immigration changes cultural concepts of race, not only for the migrants themselves, but also for their host society, and for the societies they left behind.

She has received several awards for her research, including the 2007 American Sociological Association Outstanding Dissertation Award, the 2011 Oliver Cromwell Cox Article Award from the American Sociological Association Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities, and a 2013 award from the ASA Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline. Dr. Roth is very pleased to be returning to the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, where she was an Early Career Scholar in 2007-08.

Primary Recipient Awards

Wall Scholars, Dr. Wendy Roth, 2015

Primary Recipient Wendy Roth

Program Wall Scholars

During her time in the Scholars Program, she will be working on her latest project on how genetic ancestry tests influence conceptions of race and ethnicity, and ethnic and racial identities, attitudes, and interactions. This research has two main components: a longitudinal qualitative study with people who have taken genetic ancestry tests from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds, and a quantitative study with an experimental design to study the causal impact of these tests.

During her year as a Peter Wall Scholar, Wendy will be completing data collection on the experimental study, which randomly assigns participants to either receive or not receive an ancestry test, and will be writing articles analyzing data from both components of the research.