Matt Wray, Ph.D., M.A.

Discipline(s):
Sociology, American Studies

Area(s) of Expertise:
Medical Sociology, Race & Ethnicity, Cultural Sociology

Background:

My research and teaching interests include medical sociology, race and ethnicity, cultural sociology, and public sociology. I'm also affiliated faculty in the American Studies Program at Temple.

As a Health and Society Scholar at Harvard University, I examined the racial and spatial heterogeneity of suicide rates in the American West, with a particular emphasis on Las Vegas, the city with the highest metropolitan suicide rate in the U.S.

I treat suicide rates as important measures of population health because they reflect dimensions of health missed by narrow biomedical models: namely, the social and cultural health of groups and communities. Especially in times and places of rapid social transformation, the study of suicide can expose hidden health and mortality effects of social isolation and dislocation. I'm currently at work on a book devoted to this topic.

In addition to this more recent work on suicide, I've researched multiple aspects of white identity, particularly the stigmatyping of poor rural whites. I'm also a long-time participant observer of the Burning Man Festival, an arts festival in northern Nevada.

I've explored these research themes in my books Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (Duke); White Trash: Race and Class in America (Routledge); Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life (NYU Press); and The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness (Duke).

My work has been featured in The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Business Week, and The Wall Street Journal, among dozens of other national and international publications, and I have been interviewed on numerous radio shows, including NPR's All Things Considered.

Journal Articles:
Click here for a list of Matt Wray's available publications in PubMed.

Books:

		Wray, Matt. Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness. Duke University Press, 2006
		Rasmussen, Brander, Birgit, Eric Klinenberg, Eric, Nexica, Irene and Wray, Matt, eds. The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness. Duke University Press, 2001
		Bad Subjects Production Team, eds. Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life. New York University Press, 1998
		Wray, Matt and Newitz, Annalee, eds. White Trash: Race and Class in America. Routledge, 1997