Professional Bio
David A. Snow is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine, which he joined in 2001. He taught previously at Southern Methodist University, the University of Texas, Austin, and the University of Arizona, 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 100 articles and chapters on these various topics, and of 10 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), the 3-volume Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements (with D. della Porta, B. Klandermans, and D. McAdam) and the new and expanded Wiley Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (with S. Soule, H. Kriesi, and H. McCammon).
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 has been 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, and the 2016 George Herbert Mead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. Professor Snow led the recent study of the cost of homelessness in Orange County in collaboration with OC United Way and Jamboree Housing, serves as UCI’s Faculty Athletic Representative and as Co-Director of the Center for Citizen Peacebuilding, and is a member of the Board of Directors of several Orange County non-profit organizations.