Edward Telles
Edward Telles, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine, is the author of numerous award winning books and articles about the United States and several countries of Latin America. His main topics are social demography; race and ethnicity; immigration and immigrant integration; and racial inequality, classification and identity. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin. Telles was formerly Professor at UCSB, Princeton University and UCLA as well as Program Officer for Human Rights at the Ford Foundation.
He has published widely in leading academic journals. His first two books, Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil (Princeton University Press, 2004) and Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation and Race (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2008), won several awards including the Distinguished Book Award from the American Sociological Association. Recent books include Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, Race and Color in Latin America (University of North Carolina Press 2014) and Durable Ethnicity: Mexican Americans and the Ethnic Core (Oxford University Press, 2019). He recently directed the Project on Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (PERLA), comprised of a multinational and multidisciplinary team of scholars. He earlier directed (with Ortiz) the Mexican American Study Project (MASP), a follow-up survey of about 1500 Mexican Americans (and their children) who had been interviewed 35 years earlier.
Telles has led numerous survey research projects in several Latin American countries and in the United States. He is currently examining black self-identification in ten nations of the Americas and, in another project (with Flores and Drouhout), the integration of immigrants and three generations of descendants in the United States.
An elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Sociological Research Association, Telles has reoriented the field of Sociology beyond the U.S. black-white paradigm through his research and writings on skin color, race and ethnicity globally and particularly for Latin America and Latinos in the United States.