Professional Bio
David A. Snow is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Irvine. He joined the UCI Department of Sociology in 2001 and retired in 2019. He taught previously at Southern Methodist University (1975-76), the University of Texas, Austin (1976-1987), and the University of Arizona (1987-2001), where he was Head of the Department of Sociology for nine years. He earned a BA from Ohio University, a MA in Urban Studies from the University of Akron, and his Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA.
His teaching and research interests include social protest and movements; socioeconomic marginality with an emphasis on homelessness and poverty; social psychology focusing on changes in cognitive orientation and interpretive perspectives, with an emphasis on framing processes, conversion, and identity work; religion and the persistence of belief; and qualitative field methods. He is the author or co-author of over 140 articles and chapters on these various topics, and of 11 books, including Down on Their Luck: A Study of Homeless Street People (with L. Anderson), Together Alone: Personal Relationships in Public Places (with C. Morrill and C. White), Analyzing Social Settings: A Guide to Qualitative Observation and Analysis (with J. Lofland, L. Anderson, and L. Lofland), A Primer on Social Movements (with S. Soule), a 2nd and expanded edition of the Wiley Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (with S. Soule, H. Kriesi, and H. McCammon), the expanded 5-volume edition of the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements (with D. della Porta, B. Klandermans, and D. McAdam), and a forthcoming volume of original essays on Contemporary Social Movements (edited with D. McAdam and D. Moss).
Professor Snow is past President of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction and the Pacific Sociological Association, and Vice President of the American Sociological Association. He was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, a recipient of the Society for the Study of Social Problems 2008 Lee Founders Award for career contributions to the study of social problems, the UCI Alumni Association’s 2012 Faculty Achievement Award, the 2013 John D. McCarthy Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Scholarship of Social Movements and Collective Behavior, the 2016 George Herbert Mead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, and the 2024 Aldon Morris Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Scholarship of Social Movements from the Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section of the American Sociological Association.
Professor Snow served as UCI’s Faculty Athletic Representative and as Co-Director and Director of the Center for Citizen Peacebuilding, co-led the 2017 study of the cost of homelessness in Orange County in collaboration with OC United Way and Jamboree Housing, and is a member of the Boards of Directors of several Orange County non-profit organizations working in behalf of economically marginal and homeless citizens within the county.