Hilary Silver
Hilary Silver
Professor of Sociology, International Affairs, and Public Policy and Public Administration
Core Faculty
Contact:
Email:
Hilary Silver
Office Phone:
(202) 994-0013
Hilary Silver is Professor of Sociology, International Affairs, and Public Policy and Public Administration. She arrived at GW in 2017 after rising through the ranks at Brown University, where she is Professor emerita of Sociology and Urban Studies. Silver served two terms as Editor of City & Community, the journal of the Community and Urban Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association, which honored her with the Lynd Award for Career Lifetime Achievement.
She has been a consultant to major international organizations, such as the World Bank, United Nations, IADB, and International Labor Organization, on issues of social exclusion and inclusion, and to the US Government and the State of Rhode Island on racial disparities. She has held visiting appointments at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, INSEE, and INED in Paris, Centre des Sciences Humaines in New Delhi, Universite de Lille I, WZB, and Tel Aviv, Korea, Oxford, Bristol, Sussex, New York and Columbia Universities. She was a longtime Affiliate of the Minda de Gunzberg Center for European Studies at Harvard, and a senior fellow at the Ash Center, Kennedy School of Government. She has received multiple grants from the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst [DAAD], National Science Foundation, and National Endowment for the Humanities and RI Council for the Humanities. The latter funded her two films, Southside and Direction Home.
She is co-organizer of the GW University Seminar on "Europe Since Covid-19," a member of the Executive Committee of the Eastern Sociological Society, and an elected member of the Board of the International Sociological Association's RC21 on Urban and Regional Research for the period 2023-2027.
Robert and Helen Lynd Award for Distinguished Lifetime-Career Achievement, 2016.
Fulbright Scholar to France, Germany, and Israel; Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Academic Visitor at Nuffield College Oxford, Fellow at the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute for Advanced Study and Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg.
Social exclusion and inclusion, inequality, poverty, housing, homelessness, urban studies
Migrant integration in Berlin
Graduate Courses:
SOC 6250 - Urban Sociology
SOC 6252 - Homelessness
Most cited work:
Recent works:
“Homelessness and the Coronavirus.” Social Policy Review 35 (2023): 193-219. Edited by Ruggero Cefalo, Marcia Rose and Andy Jolly. Bristol, UK: Bristol University and Policy Press. https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/display/book/9781447369219/ch010.xml
“Housing, Homelessness, and the Spatial Variation of Covid-19.” (with Rebecca Morris).
Special Issue on “Impact of the Built Environment on Health.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 20 (2023): 3265. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20043265
“Working from Home: Before and After the Pandemic.” Contexts 22, 1 (2023): 66-70. https://doi.org/10.1177/15365042221142839
“Soziale Bewegungen, die Wohnungsfrage und kritische Theorie – ein Gespräch in Erinnerung an Peter Marcuse.” Soziale Bewegungen 36, 1 (2023): 112-28. https://doi.org/10.1515/fjsb-2023-0009
“Hilary Silver on left-wing xenophobia.” Pp. 185-189 in Conversations on Illiberalism: Interviews with 50 Scholars, ed. Marlene Laruelle. Washington D.C.: Institute for European Russian and Eurasian Studies, 2022. https://www-illiberalism-org.b-cdn.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Laruelle-Conversations-on-Illiberalism-50-Scholars.pdf
“Left-Wing Xenophobia.” (with Svenja Kopyciok) Frontiers in Sociology 6 (June 2020): 1-17. Special issue on Racial and Ethnic Inequality in an Age of Populist Nationalism. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2021.666717/full
Documentary Films
Southside: The Fall and Rise of an Inner-City Neighborhood, https://www.brown.edu/academics/sociology/people/hilary-silver
Direction Home https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GS8hoRwk6Kw
Op-eds
“Hilary Silver on left-wing xenophobia.” Illiberalism Studies Program. (January 14, 2022). https://www.illiberalism.org/hilary-silver-on-left-wing-xenophobia, https://twitter.com/ILLSP_GWU/status/1482068834525888512
“How to Resist the Merger of Anti-Vaxxers and Anti-Semites.”
American Institute of Contemporary German Studies (3 February 2022) https://www.aicgs.org/2022/02/how-to-resist-the-merger-of-anti-vaxxers-and-anti-semites/
“Home-Working’s Covid Comeback.” Contexts (2 November 2022) https://contexts.org/blog/home-workings-covid-comeback/
“Berlin’s do-over elections — and ours. The Hill (21 November 2022) https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/3740559-berlins-do-over-elections-and-ours/
“Thinking outside the ballot box — why not online voting?” The Hill (18 August 2020) https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/512557-thinking-outside-the-ballot-box-why-not-online-voting
“Cancel Culture and Social Exclusion.” The Hill (29 August 2020) https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/514231-cancel-culture-as-social-exclusion
“To End Homelessness, Follow the Science.” (23 October 2020) https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/522413-to-end-homelessness-follow-the-science
Ph.D. Columbia University