Asad L. Asad is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stanford University and a faculty affiliate at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. His scholarly interests encompass social stratification; race, ethnicity, and immigration; surveillance and social control; and health. Asad’s current research agenda considers how institutional categories—in particular, citizenship and legal status—matter for multiple forms of inequality. His book Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life (Princeton University Press) examines how and why undocumented immigrants worried about deportation nonetheless engage with institutions whose records the government can use to monitor them. Additional research projects focus on the effects of immigration enforcement on health, the role of the federal judiciary in immigration enforcement, and the capacity of immigrant-serving organizations to counter the inequalities of the U.S. immigration system.

Asad’s research has been published in several outlets, including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Law & Society Review, International Migration Review, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and Social Science & Medicine, among other outlets. His work has received awards from the American Sociological Association, including the Louis Wirth Award for Best Article given by the Section on International Migration, and has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation. Asad also serves on the advisory or editorial boards of the American Sociological Review, International Migration Review, Law & Society Review, New York University Press’ series on Health, Society, and Inequality, and RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences.

Before joining the faculty at Stanford, Asad was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University’s Center for the Study of Inequality. He earned his A.M. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University, and his B.A. in Political Science and Spanish Language and Culture from the University of Wisconsin.