Lee Rainwater (7 January 1928 – 4 July 2015) was an American sociologist. He was a professor of sociology at

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

for 23 years and was a co-founder of the

Luxembourg Income Study LIS Cross-National Data Center, formerly known as the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), is a non-profit organization registered in Luxembourg which produces a cross-national database of micro-economic income data for social science research. The proj ...

, for which he was research director between 1983 and 2005. He was the author, co-author, or editor of over twenty books, including ''Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Families in a Federal Slum'' (1970), a study of the notorious St Louis, Missouri, housing development

Pruitt–Igoe The Wendell O. Pruitt Homes and William Igoe Apartments, known together as Pruitt–Igoe (), were joint urban housing projects first occupied in 1954 in St. Louis, Missouri, United States. The complex of 33 eleven-story high rises was design ...

. A series of memorial lectures has been founded in his name at

CUNY The City University of New York (CUNY, pronounced , ) is the Public university, public university system of Education in New York City, New York City. It is the largest urban university system in the United States, comprising 25 campuses: eleven ...

and began in 2017. Rainwater was the dissertation adviser for Laud Humphreys, the sociologist best known for his work on men who have sex with men in public restrooms (known as tearooms), and for the controversies surrounding the potential ethics involved in the study.

References

American sociologists Harvard University faculty 1928 births 2015 deaths {{US-sociologist-stub