Welcome to the website of Elijah Anderson

Elijah Anderson is the Sterling Professor of Sociology and of African American Studies at Yale University, and a recent Stockholm Prize Laureate. He is one of the leading urban ethnographers in the United States. His publications include Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (1999), winner of the Komarovsky Award from the Eastern Sociological Society; Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community (1990), winner of the American Sociological Association’s Robert E. Park Award for the best published book in the area of Urban Sociology; and the classic sociological work, A Place on the Corner 1978; 2nd ed., 2003). Anderson’s most recent ethnographic work, The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life, was published by WW Norton in 2011. Additionally, Professor Anderson is the recipient of the 2017 Merit Award from the Eastern Sociological Society and three prestigious awards from the American Sociological Association, including the 2013 Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award, the 2018 W.E.B. DuBois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award, and the 2021 Robert and Helen Lynd Award for Lifetime Achievement.   

Black in White Space

The Enduring Impact of Color in Everyday Life

The Cosmopolitan Canopy

Race and Civility in Everyday Life

Code of the Street

Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City

Against the Wall

Poor, Young, Black and Male

Problem of the Century

Racial Stratification in the Untied States

Streetwise

Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community

A Place on the Corner

A Study of Black Street Corner Men