Curriculum vitae

Mom's Wrigley, dad's Field. (It's fun.)

What it's like to be named Elizabeth Wrigley-Field:

• High school take
• Grad school take

My two areas of research pursue a demographically informed sociology of risk and inequality. This work integrates two approaches: classic demographic methods, designed to shift perspectives between population patterns and the individual movement in and out of social statuses that they reflect; and a distinctively sociological approach to inequality, in which multiple dimensions of stratification interact in historically specific settings.

My dissertation documents racial disparities in job insecurity in the United States, 1979-2011, and analyzes the role of occupational and industrial segregation in producing these disparities. I seek to understand the historical calamity that the end of the Civil Rights era was also the beginning of the era of economic restructuring: just as areas of the economy were opened, for the first time, to non-white workers, those jobs may have become less secure.

My other major strand of research is on modeling unobserved heterogeneity in mortality distributions, particularly in the context that health inequalities are composed of multiple interacting dimensions of inequality, only some of which are observed.

My paper "Mortality Deceleration and Mortality Selection: Three Unexpected Implications of a Simple Model" is available for download. Contact me about other papers in progress.