Jason Beckfield

Jason Beckfield is Professor of Sociology and Associate Director of the Center for Population and Development Studies at Harvard University.  He researches social policy and social inequality, and is currently writing a book about how political sociology and social epidemiology can learn from one another and develop new explanations for the uneven distribution of population health.  The book, Political Sociology and the People’s Health, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Beckfield’s research on global health has deepened through trans-disciplinary collaboration.  His work with Nancy Krieger’s group produced a series of articles that evaluate political-sociological determinants of health inequalities, several published in the American Journal of Public Health.  Recently, with an international team of researchers led by Clare Bambra, Beckfield developed a general institutional theory of social inequalities in health, which was published as “An institutional theory of welfare state effects on the distribution of population health” in Social Theory and Health in 2015.