Wendy Griswold

Wendy Griswold (born c. 1946) is an American sociologist, professor of sociology and the Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University, prior to that she was the Arthur E. Andersen Research and Teaching Professor, also at Northwestern University. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and well known for her contributions to the sociology of culture and the sociology of literature. She is the author of nine books, among them, Bearing Witness: Readers, Writers, and the Novel in Nigeria won the "Best Book" award from the Culture Section of the American Sociological Association in 2002 and the academic journal Choice named it one of the year's outstanding academic books. Prior to joining Northwestern University, Griswold was faculty at the University of Chicago.

Contributions Ultimately, Griswold's work contributed heavily to the "production of culture" perspective pioneered by Richard A. Peterson (a student of Alvin Gouldner) as well as Paul Dimaggio, a member of Griswold's Harvard cohort. This approach considers the social organization of the situations in which cultural products (like literature, art, music, etc...) are produced, and the ways in which such social organization structures the cultural output. In addition, as her work focus explicitly on literature, her work considers the distribution of readers in a population, and the related idea of cultural regionalism.