Frederick Wherry
Fred Wherry is currently the Townsend Martin, Class of 1917 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, the Director of the Debt Collection Lab (debtcollectionlab.org), and the Founding Director of the Dignity + Debt Network (dignityanddebt.org). He is also the Co-PI of the Higher Education Race and the Economy (HERE) Lab. Professor Wherry is the author or editor of nine books, including Credit Where It’s Due: Rethinking Financial Citizenship, The Oxford Handbook of Consumption, Money Talks, and Measuring Culture . He has served in advisory roles at the Boston Federal Reserve, the Aspen Institute’s Financial Security Program, and the Mission Asset Fund, and was elected as the president-elect of the Eastern Sociological Society and was the 2018 president of the Social Science History Association. He is currently on the board of directors for the Change Machine and on the Executive Committee of the Princeton Alumni Council, and serves on the advisory board of the Race in the Marketplace (RIM) Network. He co-edits the book series Culture and Economic Life. He was an undergraduate student and a Morehead-Cain Scholar at the UNC at Chapel Hill. He then earned his Master’s in public affairs at the School of Public and International Affairs and completed his doctorate in sociology at Princeton University in 2004. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, he served on the faculties of Michigan, Columbia, and Yale, before returning to Princeton.
