Asad L. Asad

Asad L. Asad is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stanford University and a faculty affiliate at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. His scholarly interests encompass social stratification, migration and immigrant incorporation, race/ethnicity, and health. Asad's current research agenda considers how institutions—particularly U.S. immigration policy and practice—mediate various facets of inequality.

Asad is engaged in two primary lines of inquiry. His first research project, a book under contract with Princeton University Press, is based on a five-year study of Latin American-origin families in Dallas, Texas. It examines the diverse ways Latin American immigrants with U.S.-citizen children perceive and respond to the threat of deportation. One paper outlines the specific risks these families associate with holding a "legal" relative to an "illegal" status. Additional articles based on this research appear in American Behavioral Scientist, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and Social Science & Medicine. Another project relies on large-scale survey data to study how patterns of ethno-racial inequality in Mexico relate to individuals' opportunities for lawful migration to the United States. Articles from this project appear in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and International Migration Review.

Asad’s prior research has been published in journals such as American Behavioral Scientist, Annual Review of Sociology, Population and Environment, Qualitative Sociology, and Social Science & Medicine. His work has received awards from the American Sociological Association, including the Louis Wirth Award for Best Article given by the Section on International Migration, and has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Sperry Fund, as well as the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Center for American Political Studies, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.

Asad earned his Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University, where he was affiliated with the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Multidisciplinary Program on Inequality and Social Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Before joining the faculty at Stanford, he completed a fellowship at Cornell University's Center for the Study of Inequality. He holds a B.A. in Political Science and Spanish Language and Culture from the University of Wisconsin, as well as an A.M. in Sociology from Harvard. Read more about Asad on his website.

Professor Asad joined Stanford as part of the Faculty Development Initiative in 2019.