Rachel Sherman is the Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology at the New School. She is broadly interested in how and why unequal social relations are reproduced, legitimated, and contested, and in how these processes are embedded in cultural vocabularies of identity, interaction, and entitlement. Empirically, she uses ethnography and in-depth interviewing to investigate service work, consumption, and increasing economic inequality in the contemporary U.S. context. She is the author of Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels (California, 2007) and Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence (Princeton, 2017). Her current book project, Class Traitors (under contract with Princeton), explores the world of radical and progressive wealthy people working to change the systems that have enabled their wealth. She was an Andrew Carnegie Fellow in 2018-20.
