Past Scholar
About
Anthony M. Orum is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is currently a Visiting Professor at the Center for Urban Research and Learning at Loyola University in Chicago. Over the course of his career he also has taught at Emory University, the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and the University of Texas at Austin. His major fields of interest are qualitative methods, racial and ethnic relations in America, politics and cities.
His early work concentrated on the study of African-Americans, in particular their politics. His first published monograph, Black Students in Protest: A Study of the Black Student Movement, was one of the first publications in the Arnold and Caroline Rose Monograph Series of the American Sociological Association. He also published several important articles on black politics in America in the American Journal of Sociology and the American Sociological Review in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In the next phase of his career he turned his attention to the study of politics and society, in general. In 1978 he published the book, Introduction to Political Sociology with Prentice-Hall.
That book is now in its 5th edition, and has been translated several times into Chinese. Among other things it also led to an invitation to lecture on politics and the 1988 American Presidential election at Fudan University in November 1988. Since that time he has maintained close ties to Fudan as well as to various colleagues in China.
In the early 1980s he shifted his attention to the study of cities and has maintained that focus as a central one for his work ever since. In 1987, he published the first book-length history of Austin, Texas, The Making of Modern Austin: Power, Money & The People. The book was reprinted in 2002. Soon thereafter along with his colleagues, Joe Feagin and Gideon Sjoberg he published an edited collection with the University of North Carolina Press, A Case for the Case Study. That book has become one of the most widely cited works on the nature and implementation of case study research in sociology and the other social sciences. In 2002, he became the Founding Editor of the journal, City & Community, and remained so until 2009. Along with Xiangming Chen and Krista Paulsen, he published a new, major textbook on cities in 2012, Introduction to Cities: How Place and Space Shape Human Experience (Wiley-Blackwell). The book is published in Chinese and English.
Over the course of the past ten years or so he also has done empirical research and writing on immigration, in Chicago, in particular. He is the Principal Investigator on a project funded by the National Science Foundation in 2007, Ethnic Communities in Chicago. The analyses from this research are underway, and publications will be forthcoming in the next few years.
He has received several honors for his work, among them, the Robert and Helen Lynd Award of the Community and Urban Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association, as well as Fulbright awards to teach in China (2007) and to do ethnographic research there (2008). He also has served as President of the Midwest Sociological Association (1996-97). Most recently he was one of the keynote speakers at the Shanghai Forum in May 2012.
