The Robin M. Williams Jr. Distinguished Lecture Award

The Robin. M. Williams Jr. Distinguished Lecture Award was established in 1993 as part of the Eastern Sociological Society's effort to enhance the sharing of sociological ideas within and beyond the discipline. The Robin M. Williams Jr. Lecture Award is granted each year to a sociologist in recognition of his/her sociological and scholarly contribution and its relevance for contemporary public life.

The recipient of the Robin. M. Williams Jr. Distinguished Lecture Award is invited to deliver a keynote at the Eastern Sociological Society’s annual meetings. The Robin M. Williams Jr. lecturer also delivers invited lectures at two campuses within the Society's jurisdiction during their year as the Williams Lecturer. The ESS Executive Office will provide transportation and honoraria: the host institution will take care of local arrangements, including room and board. The individual chosen for the Lectureship will receive an honorarium and will present two lectures on campuses in the ESS region during the terms of his or her appointment. (These campuses will be selected on a competitive basis.)

To nominate someone for the 2026-2027 Robin M. Williams, Jr. Lecture, please send nominations (self-nominations welcome) in a letter to the Committee Chair, Richard Ocejo (rocejo@jjay.cuny.edu). Nomination letters should describe the proposed lecture, its sociological warrant and public relevance, as well as the qualifications of the nominee to deliver the Robin M. Williams lecture. Nomination can also include up to two supporting letters. ​​​​Nominations are due October 15, 2025.

The 2026-2027 Robin M. Williams, Jr. Lecture will be selected by December 15, 2025.

2024-25 Lecturer (2024 Award Recipient): Richard E. Ocejo, John Jay College and the CUNY Graduate Center:

Richard E. Ocejo is Professor of Sociology at John Jay College and the CUNY Graduate Center, where he also directs the MA program in International Migration Studies. He has served as the Editor of City & Community, an official journal of the American Sociological Association, since 2021. He is the author or editor of five books. His most recent book, Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification and Race in a Small American City (Princeton University Press, 2024), examines how gentrification unfolds differently in small municipalities and gets morally justified through the use of racial discourses. Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press; 2017), is about the transformation of low-status occupations into "cool," cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men's barbers, and whole animal butchers). His first book, Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press; 2014), examines nightlife and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. Ocejo’s work has appeared in such journals as Social Forces, Social Problems, Sociological Perspectives, Journal of Urban Affairs, and Poetics and he serve on the editorial boards of the journals Work and Occupations, Metropolitics, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Richard Ocejo’s scholarly engagements cut across urban and cultural sociology, community studies, work and occupations, and research methods (especially qualitative methods). He hosts a podcast on the Sociology channel on the New Books Network. ​

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Richard Ocejo will be speaking at Hudson Valley Community College and at the University of Massachusetts-Boston.

About Robin M. Williams Jr.

Robin Murphy Williams (1914-2006) was born on October 11, 1914, in Hillsborough, NC, the son of Robin M., Sr. (a farmer), and Mabel (a homemaker). He received his B.S. in 1933 from North Carolina State College; his M.S. in 1935 from N.C. State and the University of North Carolina; his M.A. in 1939 from Harvard University; and his Ph.D. in 1943 from Harvard University. During World War II, he served in the Special Services Division of the US War Department in Washington, D.C., and the European Theater of Operations from 1942 to 1946.

As an Army researcher on the frontlines, he was a contributor to the classic work, The American Soldier. For much of his long and distinguished career at Cornell University (from 1946 to 1985, then emeritus from 1985 to 2003), he was a member of the Sociology Department. He served as chair of that Department from 1956 through 196l and was appointed the Henry Scarborough Professor of Social Science in 1967. After becoming Professor Emeritus in 1985, Williams continued to teach at both Cornell University and the University of California, Irvine. His research fostered understanding of some of the most difficult problems of American society. He devoted much of his career and writing to studies of intergroup tensions, race relations, war and peace, ethnic conflict, and altruism and cooperation.

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Dr. Williams was a Past-President of the American Sociological Association, Past-President of the Eastern Sociological Association, Founding Editor of Sociological Forum, and the Co-Chair of the Committee on the Status of Black Americans. Dr. Williams’ many awards and honors include the Commonwealth Award for Distinguished Service, the American Sociological Association’s Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award, and the Robin M. Williams, Jr. Distinguished Lectureship Award established by the Eastern Sociological Association.

His best-known works include The American Soldier (Vols. 1-11, 1949); Schools in Transition (1954); and What College Students Think (1960); The Reduction of Intergroup Tensions (1947); Strangers Next Door (1964), American Society: A Sociological Interpretation (1st edition, 1951; 2nd edition, 1960; 3rd edition, 1970); Mutual Accommodation: Ethnic Conflict and Cooperation (1977); and most recently, The Wars Within: Peoples and States in Conflict (2003). He was also a co-editor of A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society (1989). He was the author as well of some hundred and fifty articles, monographs, and chapters in edited volumes.

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