Rate My Professor Rachel Sherman

Rachel Sherman is the Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology at The New School for Social Research. She earned an AB from Brown University in 1991 and a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003. Prior to her current appointment, she served as an assistant professor in the Sociology Department at Yale University. Sherman’s research examines how unequal social relations are reproduced, legitimated, and contested, with particular attention to cultural vocabularies of identity, interaction, and moral worth. She employs ethnography and in-depth interviewing to study service work, entitlement, lifestyle, and redistributive movements in the contemporary United States.

Her first book, Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels, was published by the University of California Press in 2007. Her second book, Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence, appeared with Princeton University Press in 2017. She is currently working on a project titled Class Traitors concerning wealthy progressives who challenge systems of wealth accumulation. Sherman was an Andrew Carnegie Fellow from 2018 to 2020. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on topics including elite parenting, lifestyle management work, and labor movement revitalization. An early co-authored article received the Distinguished Article Award from the Labor Studies Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems in 2001.