ENGLISH CORNER, CON LINDA JIMÉNEZ – This week’s trivia question: About what percentage of New Yorkers earn more than $250,000 a year?

Rachel Sherman is an associate professor of sociology at the New School for Social Research in New York. Sherman obtained her bachelor’s degree in Development Studies from Brown University and she received a master’s degree and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley.

Sherman’s main area of interest and the focus of her research is structures of inequality in the United States. Her first book, Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels (2007), analyzes how workers, guests, and managers in luxury hotels make sense of and negotiate class inequalities that marked their relationships. Her second book, Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence (2017) explores the lived experience of privilege among wealthy and affluent parents in New York City, a subject she had already written articles about for The New York Times, The Guardian, and Quartz.

Now Sherman will have the opportunity to expand on her research as one of 31 “extraordinary scholars and writers” awarded the prestigious Andrew Carnegie fellowship for 2018. The grant permits fellows “to devote their time to significant research, writing, and publishing in the humanities and social sciences.”