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Judith Blau (born April 27, 1942) is an American sociologist and
professor emerita ''Emeritus/Emerita'' () is an honorary title granted to someone who retirement, retires from a position of distinction, most commonly an academic faculty position, but is allowed to continue using the previous title, as in "professor emeritus". ...
of the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC, UNC–Chapel Hill, or simply Carolina) is a public university, public research university in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States. Chartered in 1789, the university first began enrolli ...
. Most of her academic career has been devoted to teaching and writing about
human rights Human rights are universally recognized Morality, moral principles or Social norm, norms that establish standards of human behavior and are often protected by both Municipal law, national and international laws. These rights are considered ...
, and she retired to
Wellfleet, Massachusetts Wellfleet is a New England town, town in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, Barnstable County, Massachusetts, United States, and is located halfway between the "tip" and "elbow" of Cape Cod. The town had a population of 3,566 at the 2020 United ...
, where she continues to teach.


Education and career

Judith was awarded a BA from the
University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, or UChi) is a Private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its main campus is in the Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Chic ...
in 1964 and a MA, also from Chicago, in 1967, and a PhD in 1972, from
Northwestern University Northwestern University (NU) is a Private university, private research university in Evanston, Illinois, United States. Established in 1851 to serve the historic Northwest Territory, it is the oldest University charter, chartered university in ...
. Blau taught at
Baruch College Baruch College (officially the Bernard M. Baruch College) is a public college in New York City, United States. It is a constituent college of the City University of New York system. Named for financier and statesman Bernard M. Baruch, the colle ...
as an
assistant professor Assistant professor is an academic rank just below the rank of an associate professor used in universities or colleges, mainly in the United States, Canada, Japan, and South Korea. Overview This position is generally taken after earning a doct ...
from 1973 to 1976, held a post-doctoral fellowship at
Albert Einstein College of Medicine The Albert Einstein College of Medicine is a Private university, private medical school in New York City. Founded in 1953, Einstein is an independent degree-granting institution within the Montefiore Einstein Health System. Einstein hosts Doc ...
(1976–1978), taught at the
State University of New York at Albany The State University of New York at Albany (University at Albany, UAlbany, or SUNY Albany) is a public research university in Albany, New York, United States. Founded in 1844, it is one of four "university centers" of the State University of N ...
(1978–1982), and the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC, UNC–Chapel Hill, or simply Carolina) is a public university, public research university in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States. Chartered in 1789, the university first began enrolli ...
(1982–2013) where she founded and chaired the Social and Economic Justice minor within the Sociology department. She founded and directed the Human Rights Center of Chapel Hill and Carrboro in 2009, which was an NGO that advocated for the rights of refugees and migrants. Her husband, Peter Michael Blau taught in the same department, as
emeritus professor ''Emeritus/Emerita'' () is an honorary title granted to someone who retires from a position of distinction, most commonly an academic faculty position, but is allowed to continue using the previous title, as in "professor emeritus". In some c ...
, until his death March 12, 2002. She has two daughters, Reva Blau and Pamela Blau. Blau also taught at
Nankai University Nankai University is a public university in Tianjin, China. It is affiliated with the Ministry of Education of China. The university is part of Project 211, Project 985, and the Double First-Class Construction. Nankai University was establ ...
in Tianjin, China,
Hunter College Hunter College is a public university in New York City, United States. It is one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York and offers studies in more than one hundred undergraduate and postgraduate fields across five schools ...
,
New York University New York University (NYU) is a private university, private research university in New York City, New York, United States. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded in 1832 by Albert Gallatin as a Nondenominational ...
,
Mary Baldwin College Mary Baldwin University (MBU, formerly Mary Baldwin College) is a private university in Staunton, Virginia, United States. It was founded in 1842 as "Augusta Female Seminary". Today, Mary Baldwin University is home to the Mary Baldwin College fo ...
and spent an academic year at the
Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study The Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) in Amsterdam, Netherlands, is an independent research institute in the field of the humanities and social and behavioural sciences founded in 1970. The insti ...
. Her early career was devoted, first to a study of
scientists A scientist is a person who researches to advance knowledge in an area of the natural sciences. In classical antiquity, there was no real ancient analog of a modern scientist. Instead, philosophers engaged in the philosophical study of nature ...
and, then, to a study of
architects An architect is a person who plans, designs, and oversees the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to provide services in connection with the design of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the buildings that h ...
. In the early 1970s, both physics and architecture were undergoing dramatic transformation. Physicists had early access to the
internet The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...
, allowing them to participate in international scientific exchanges, in defiance of the
Cold War The Cold War was a period of global Geopolitics, geopolitical rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist Eastern Bloc, which lasted from 1947 unt ...
.
Postmodernism Postmodernism encompasses a variety of artistic, Culture, cultural, and philosophical movements that claim to mark a break from modernism. They have in common the conviction that it is no longer possible to rely upon previous ways of depicting ...
was displacing
modernism Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...
in architecture, just as postmodernism affected philosophy and art theory. She has worked in several sociological specialties, and gradually discovered that she could wed her passion for social and economic justice with the same scholarly discipline she brought to her study of communications among scientists. In her current research on
constitutions A constitution is the aggregate of fundamental principles or established precedents that constitute the legal basis of a polity, organization or other type of entity, and commonly determines how that entity is to be governed. When these princ ...
, she has found that the U.S. is an outlier in two respects: it never ratifies human rights treaties and has not revised the Constitution's
Bill of Rights A bill of rights, sometimes called a declaration of rights or a charter of rights, is a list of the most important rights to the citizens of a country. The purpose is to protect those rights against infringement from public officials and pri ...
. The
United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...
is in a small minority of states that do not recognize economic, social and cultural rights. The US is also an
outlier In statistics, an outlier is a data point that differs significantly from other observations. An outlier may be due to a variability in the measurement, an indication of novel data, or it may be the result of experimental error; the latter are ...
on economic inequality, with immense gaps between the 1 percent and the 99 percent.


Memberships and awards

Blau served on the Executive Council of the American Sociological Association, on the Board of the North Carolina chapter of ACLU, as President of the Southern Sociological Society, and was editor of Social Forces. She founded the U.S. chapter of Sociologists without Borders in 2002. Blau served as its president from 2002 to 2011. She was the recipient of the 2006 Lester F. Ward Award of the Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology, the 2013 annual Orange County
Pauli Murray Anna Pauline "Pauli" Murray (November 20, 1910 – July 1, 1985) was an American civil rights activist, advocate, legal scholar and theorist, author and – later in life – an Episcopal priest. Murray's work influenced the civil r ...
Award, and the American Sociological Association's Distinguished Career Award for the Practice of Sociology, and is a lifetime honorary member of the Cooperstown Baseball Hall of Fame.


Publications

''Human Rights: Beyond the Liberal Vision'', co-authored with Alberto Moncada, is a book that critiques American society. It has been called a "brave book" by the journal ''
Social Forces ''Social Forces'' (formerly ''The Journal of Social Forces'') is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal of social science published by Oxford University Press for the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. ...
''.


Sole-authored and sole-edited books

* Architects and Firms. Cambridge: MA: MIT Press, 1983. * The Shape of Culture: A Study of Contemporary Cultural Patterns in the U.S. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. * Social Contracts and Economic Markets. New York: Plenum, 1993. * Blackwell Companion to Sociology (ed.) Malden MA: Blackwell, 2001. * Race in the Schools: Perpetuating White Dominance? Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003. Recipient of the American Sociological Association's Oliver Cromwell Cox Award. * The Paris Agreement: Climate Change, Solidarity and Human Rights. New York, NY: Palgrave 2017 * Crimes Against Humanity: Climate Change and Trump's Legacy of Planetary Destruction. New York: Routledge, 2018.


Co-authored books (selected)

*Judith Blau, Mark La Gory, and John Pipkin, eds., Professionals and Urban Form. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983. . *John Pipkin, Mark La Gory, and Judith Blau, eds. Remaking the City: Social Science Perspectives On Urban Design. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983. . * Judith Blau and Alberto Moncada, Human Rights: Beyond the Liberal Vision. Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. * Judith Blau and Alberto Moncada, Justice in the United States: Human Rights and the U.S. Constitution. Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. * Judith Blau and Alberto Moncada, Freedoms and Solidarities: We Humans. Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. * Judith Blau and Alberto Moncada, Human Rights: A Primer. Boulder: Paradigm, 2009. * Judith Blau and Louis Edgar Esparza, Human Rights: A Primer. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2016. *Judith Blau, David L Brunsma, Alberto Moncada and Catherine Zimmer, The Leading Rogue State: The U.S. and Human Rights. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2008. * Reva Blau, Judith Blau, Climate Chaos and Its Origins in Slavery and Capitalism (Anthem Sociological Perspectives on Human Rights and Development) Hardcover – September 15, 2020


Co-edited books (selected)

* Arnold Foster and Judith Blau, eds., Art and Society: Readings in the Sociology of Art. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989. * Judith Blau and Norman Goodman, eds., Social Roles and Social Institutions: Essays in Honor of Rose Laub Coser. New Brunswick: Transaction Press, 1995. * Judith Blau and Keri Iyall Smith, eds., Public Sociology Reader. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006 * Judith Blau and Marina Karides, eds., The World and US Social Forums. Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. * Judith Blau and Mark Frezzo, eds., Sociology and Human Rights: A Bill of Rights for the 21st Century. Los Angeles: Sage, 2012. * Keri Iyall Smith, Louis Esparza and ____ Human Rights Of the People, For the People: How to Critique and Revise the U.S. Constitution. New York: Routledge, 2017.


Articles and book chapters (selected)

* Judith Blau, "Patterns of Communication and Theoretical High Energy Physicists," Sociometry 37 (1974): 391–406. * Judith Blau and Peter M. Blau, "The Cost of Inequality: Metropolitan Structure and Violent Crime," American Sociological Review 47 (February 1982): 114–129. * Judith Blau, "Elite Arts, the de Rigeuer and the Less," Social Forces 64 (June 1986): 875–905. * Judith Blau, "The Context and Content of Collaboration: Architecture and the Social Sciences," Journal of Architectural Education 45 (Fall 1991): 36–40. * Kenneth C. Land, Glenn Deane, and Judith Blau, "Religious Pluralism, Social Conditions, and Spatial Diffusion: An Analysis of Their Effects on Church Membership," American Sociological Review 56 (April 1991): 237–249. * * Judith Blau and Charles Heying, "Historically Black Organizations in the Nonprofit Sector." Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 25 (December 1996): 540–545. * Judith Blau, "Alley Art: Can We…. See….. the End of Ontology?" pp. 187–208 in Jonathan Turner (ed.), Handbook of Sociological Theory (New York: Kluwer/Plenum Press, 2001). * Judith Blau, Vicki L. Lamb, Elizabeth Stearns, and Lisa Pellerin, "Cosmopolitan Environments and Adolescents’ Achievement Gains," Sociology of Education 74 (April 2001): 121–138 * * * Judith Blau, "What Would Sartre Say? What Would Arendt Reply?" Social Forces: 85(2007):1063-1078 Judith Blau, "Globalization," Interview in Islamic Perspectives (Tehran and London), 2 (2010): * * Judith Blau, "ASA Member Resolution on the Iraq War: Response to Criticisms," Footnotes of the American Sociological Association 31 (September/October 2003): 14. * * Judith Blau, “We Are All in the Same Canoe.” CounterPunch.org, 11 Aug. 2023, www.counterpunch.org/2023/08/11/we-are-all-in-the-same-canoe/. Accessed 11 Sept. 2023.


See also

https://sociology.unc.edu/files/2018/08/Judith-Blau-CV-Aug-2018.pdf


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Blau, Judith American sociologists American women sociologists University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faculty 1942 births Living people American women social scientists University of Chicago alumni Northwestern University alumni Social Forces editors 21st-century American women