Notable

Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration (Harvard University Press, 2003), co-authored by Cornell sociologist Victor Nee, has won three awards in recent months. The most recent is the 2005 Mirra Komarovsky Award of the Eastern Sociological Society. "The committee found the book to be a stunning contribution, both empirically and theoretically, to an issue of deep sociological, and public, concern," said New York University sociologist Jeff Goodwin, on behalf of the award committee. The book is also the recipient of the prestigious 2004 Thomas and Znaniecki Best Book Award from the American Sociological Association's International Migration Section and of an honorable mention from the Association of American Publishers' 2003 Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Award in Sociology and Anthropology. Nee is the Goldwin Smith Professor of Sociology and director of the Center for the Study of Economy and Society at Cornell. His book, written with Richard Alba, a former assistant professor of sociology at Cornell and now a distinguished professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Albany, is the first systematic look at U.S. assimilation since the 1960s. The authors conclude that immigrants (who now make up 20 percent of the U.S. population) and their children are expanding the cultural repertoire of the United States probably just as much as U.S. culture changes them.