Professor Emerita of Sociology, Yale University
Deborah studied Chinese with Mrs. Lin at Wellesley College. After earning her doctorate in Sociology at Boston University, she joined the Yale Department of Sociology as a lecturer in 1978 and retired as Full Professor in 2018, during which time she held fellowships from the National Academy of Sciences, National Institute of Aging, Luce Foundation, Templeton Foundation, Ford Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. During her forty years on the Yale faculty, Deborah served as Director of Academic Programs at the Yale Centerfor Study of Globalization, as Chair of the Department of Sociology, and as Co-Chair of the Women Faculty Forum. Her primary teaching interests include inequality and stratification, contemporary Chinese society, and methods of fieldwork. Since 2016, she has been a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Fudan University in Shanghai and on the faculty of the Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University. She previously served six terms as a Trustee of the Yale China Association and chaired the Advisory Board of the Universities’ Service Center Library at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Currently she is on the editorial boards of The China Quarterly, The China Review, and the Chinese Sociological Review.
