Charles Hirschman

Boeing International Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Public Policy & Governance
Curriculum Vitae

Biography

Charles Hirschman joined the Evans School faculty in 2002. Hirschman’s primary appointment is in the University of Washington’s Department of Sociology, where he has been on the faculty since 1987.  He is also the Boeing International Professor, a university wide distinguished professorship.

Hirschman taught undergraduate and graduate courses on demography, immigration and ethnicity, and Southeast Asia; and his research focuses on immigration and ethnicity in the United States and on social change in Southeast Asia. He also directed the University of Washington-Beyond High School project, a longitudinal study of educational attainment and the early life course of young adults..

He previously held faculty positions at Duke University from 1972-81, and at Cornell University from 1981-87.

He is the author of Ethnic and Social Stratification in Peninsular Malaysia (1975), and is the co-editor of Southeast Asian Studies in the Balance: Reflections from America (1992) and The Handbook of International Migration (1999). He has also written more than one hundred and twenty journal articles and book chapters.

Hirschman was elected president of the Population Association of America in 2005, and is also an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Washington State Academy of Sciences. He has also served as the chairman of Section K (Social, Economic, and Political Sciences) of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences from 2004-05 and a Fulbright Visiting Professor at the University of Malaya from 2012-13. He gave the University of Washington Annual Faculty Lecture in 2009.

He has been a visiting fellow at: the Australian National University in 1985, the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences from 1993-94, the Russell Sage Foundation from 1998-99, the Population Reference Bureau from 2005-06. He also served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in a rural village in Malaysia from 1965 to 1967.

Hirschman holds a Ph.D. and MA in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a BA in sociology from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.