Honky Dalton Conley

Dalton Clark Conley (born 1969) is an American sociologist. Conley is a professor at Princeton University and has written eight books, including a memoir and a sociology textbook.

Conley attended Stuyvesant High School. He subsequently graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a B.A. in humanities and from Columbia University with an M.P.A. in public policy and a Ph.D. in sociology. He also holds an M.S. and Ph.D. in biology (genomics) from NYU.[1]

Conley is best known for his contributions to understanding how health and socioeconomic status are transmitted across generations.[2] His first book, Being Black, Living in the Red (1999), focuses on the role of family wealth in perpetuating class advantages and racial inequalities in the post-Civil Rights era.[3]

He has also studied the role of health in the status attainment process. An article, "Is Biology Destiny: Birth Weight and Life Chances" (with Neil G. Bennett, American Sociological Review 1999) and his second book, The Starting Gate: Birth Weight and Life Chances (with Kate Strully and Neil G. Bennett, 2003) addressed the importance of birth weight and prenatal health to later socioeconomic outcomes.[4] Conley's next book, The Pecking Order, which followed in 2004, argued for the importance of within-family, ascriptive factors in determining sibling differences in socioeconomic success.[5] Conley's subsequent book, Elsewhere, U.S.A., published in 2009, describes changes in American work-life attitudes and social ethics in the information economy.[6] In 2014, he published the satirical book, Parentology: Everything You Wanted to Know About the Science of Raising Children but Were Too Exhausted to Ask, using his own parenting decisions as examples.[7][8]

In 2017, Conley published The Genome Factor, co-authored with Jason Fletcher. This book discusses the nature versus nurture debate and the influence of genes on social life.[9] Conley has also written an introductory sociology textbook, entitled You May Ask Yourself, currently in its 7th edition.[10] He has also penned a memoir, Honky (2000) that examines Conley's own childhood growing up white in an inner-city neighborhood of housing projects of New York City.[11]

Conley is the Henry Putnam University Professor of Sociology at Princeton University.[12]

• Elected Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science (2019).[13]
• Elected Member, National Academy of Sciences (2018).[14]
• Otis Dudley Duncan Award, American Sociological Association (2018).[15]
• Elected Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2017).[16]
• Guggenheim Fellow (2011).[17]
• Elected to the Council on Foreign Relations (2007).[18]
• Alan T. Waterman Award, National Science Foundation (2005).[19]
• CAREER Award, National Science Foundation (2001).[20]
• Investigator Award, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (1999).[21]
• Dissertation Award, American Sociological Association (1997).[22]

Conley is married to the Bosnian-American astrophysicist Tea Temim with whom he has a child. He also has two children from a previous marriage: a daughter named E and a son named Yo Xing Heyno Augustus Eisner Alexander Weiser Knuckles Jeremijenko-Conley.[23][24]

• Being Black, Living in the Red. University of California Press. 1999. ISBN 978-0-520-21673-0.
• Honky. University of California Press. 2000. ISBN 0-520-21586-9.
• The Pecking Order. Random House. 2004. ISBN 978-0-375-71381-1.
• Elsewhere, U.S.A. Random House. 2009. ISBN 978-0-375-42290-4.
• You May Ask Yourself. W. W. Norton & Company. 2011. ISBN 978-0-393-12020-2.
• The Genome Factor. Princeton University Press. 2017. ISBN 978-0-691-16474-8., with Jason Fletcher

1. ^ "Princeton University Sociology Faculty". Archived from the original on 2016-07-01.
2. ^ "Dalton Conley - Princeton University Faculty Bio". 2016. Archived from the original on 2016-08-16.
3. ^ Conley, Dalton (1999). Being Black, Living in the Red. University of California Press. ISBN 9780520261303.
4. ^ Conley, Dalton (2003). The Starting Gate: Birth Weight and Life Chances. University of California Press. ISBN 9780520239555.
5. ^ Conley, Dalton (2004). The Pecking Order: Which Siblings Succeed and Why. Pantheon. ISBN 0375421742.
6. ^ Conley, Dalton (2009). Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety. Pantheon. ISBN 978-0375422904.
7. ^ Conley, Dalton (2014). Parentology: Everything You Wanted to Know About the Science of Raising Children but Were Too Exhausted to Ask. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-1476712659.
8. ^ "Parent Like a Mad Scientist". Time. 2014.
9. ^ Conley, Dalton; Fletcher, Jason (24 January 2017). The Genome Factor - Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691164748.
10. ^ Conley, Dalton (2015). You May Ask Yourself: An Introduction to Thinking Like a Sociologist. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0393937732.
11. ^ Conley, Dalton (2000). Honky. University of California Press. ISBN 0520215869.
12. ^ "Dalton Conley". Princeton University.
13. ^ "AAAS Announces 2019 Fellows". 2019.
14. ^ "News From the National Academy of Sciences".
15. ^ "Population Section Award Recipients".
16. ^ "American Academy Member Directory".
17. ^ "Guggenheim Fellows".
18. ^ "CFR Membership Roster".
19. ^ "News from the NSF".
20. ^ "NSF Announces CAREER Awardees".
21. ^ "RWJF Investigator Award Bio".
22. ^ "ASA Dissertation Awards by Year".
23. ^ Bahrampour, Tara (25 September 2003). "A Boy Named Yo, Etc.; Name Changes, Both Practical and Fanciful, Are on the Rise". The New York Times. Retrieved 4 September 2012.
24. ^ Conley, Dalton (10 June 2010). "Raising E and Yo..." Psychology Today. Retrieved 19 August 2016.

• The Guardian profile of Honky