Michael O. Emerson

Michael O. Emerson is an American sociologist of religion and author whose known for his work on religion, race and ethnicity, urban sociology, and public policy. He is the Harry and Hazel Chavanne Fellow in Religion and Public Policy and Director of the Religion and Public Policy Program at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. At Rice University, Emerson was the founding director of the Center on Race, Religion, and Urban Life and co-founded the Kinder Institute for Urban Research with Stephen Klineberg in 2010. He was the President of the Association for the Sociology of Religion from 2015 to 2017. Emerson served as Professor of Sociology and Department Head at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 2020 to 2023. Since June 2023, he has held the Chavanne Fellowship at the Baker Institute at Rice University, where he directs the Religion and Public Policy Program (RP3).

Emerson's 2000 book Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America, co-authored with Christian Smith, won the 2001 Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.

Education Emerson earned a B.A. in sociology (summa cum laude) from Loyola University of Chicago in 1988, where he received the Gallagher Key Award. He completed an M.A. (1990) and Ph.D. (1991) in sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His doctoral dissertation was titled The Urban Underclass: A Theory of Separate Spheres. It received the 2001 Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and has sold more than 100,000 copies. A 25th anniversary updated edition was published by Oxford University Press in 2025.

The book's framework has been influential in subsequent scholarship on religion and urban life; for example, Mulder and Smith (2009) drew on Emerson and Smith's study of evangelicals and racialization as a point of departure for examining evangelical anti-urban bias and suburban settlement patterns. The book received the 2012 C. Calvin Smith Book Award from the Southern Conference of African American Studies.

Portraits of American Life Study Emerson served as primary investigator for the Portraits of American Life Study, a longitudinal panel study funded by the Lilly Endowment with grants totaling over $3.9 million across its two waves (2003–2007 and 2011–2013). The study followed the same 1,300 individuals over the course of their lives, with interview waves completed in 2006 and 2012. The project included oversamples of African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos to analyze religious life within specific racial and ethnic communities.

Selected publications

Books

Emerson, M.O. and Smith, C. (2000) Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Sarah Burnett Teaching Prize, Rice University (2012) President, Association for the Sociology of Religion (2015–2017)