Marta Tienda will be the next president of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, succeeding Ken Prewitt, who has led the organization since 2015. Her term begins on July 1.
Tienda is the Academy’s 2004 Ernest W. Burgess Fellow, and the Maurice P. During ’22 Professor in Demographic Studies and Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University, with joint affiliations in the university’s Office of Population Research and The Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. She served as director of Princeton’s Office of Population Research from 1997 to 2002, and as founding director of the university’s Program in Latino Studies from 2009 to 2018.
Tienda has studied immigration, population diversification, and concentrated poverty, documenting how social arrangements and life course trajectories both perpetuate and reshape socioeconomic inequality. Publications she has co-authored or co-edited include Multiple Origins, Uncertain Destinies: Hispanics and the American Future (National Academies Press 2006), Hispanics and the Future of America (National Academies Press 2006), Africa on the Move: African Migration and Urbanisation in Comparative Perspective (Wits University Press 2006), Ethnicity and Causal Mechanisms (Cambridge University Press 2005), Youth in Cities: A Cross-National Perspective (Cambridge University Press 2002), The Color of Opportunity: Pathways to Family, Work, and Welfare (University of Chicago Press 2001), The Drug Connection in U.S.-Mexican Relations (Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies 1989), Divided Opportunities: Minorities, Poverty, and Social Policy (Plenum Publishers 1988), The Hispanic Population of the United States (Russell Sage Foundation, 1987), Hispanics in the U.S. Economy (Academic Press 1985), and Immigration: Issues and Policy (Olympia Press 1984). In addition to contributing several articles to The ANNALS, Tienda was a co-special editor (with Mark C. Long) of the January 2010 volume of The ANNALS, “Beyond Admissions: Re-Thinking College Opportunities and Outcomes,” and is coediting (with Lisa Gennetian) a forthcoming (July 2021) volume of The ANNALS on Hispanics in America. Tienda holds a BA in Spanish from Michigan State University; her MA and PhD, both in Sociology, are from the University of Texas at Austin.
Prewitt, the outgoing president, is the Academy’s 2001 Harold Lasswell Fellow. He is a former director of the U.S. Census Bureau and past president of the Social Science Research Council. He has been a long-time champion of the ways in which sound data and good social science can advance the public good and inform public policy.
“The AAPSS has been incredibly fortunate to have Dr. Prewitt as its president over the past six years, and will be just as fortunate to have Marta Tienda at the helm moving forward,” said Rebecca Maynard, a University of Pennsylvania economist who chairs the AAPSS Board of Directors. “Marta is a phenomenal scholar, whose wide-ranging professional involvements are emblematic of the kind of work the Academy stands for: first-rate social science that illuminates important issues and can be influential in public policy. The Board is anxious to see how her prodigious talents will be brought to bear on the Academy’s work.”
