Background
Alba grew up in New York City, where he attended the Bronx High School of Science, followed by undergraduate and graduate training at Columbia University, where he earned his Bachelor of Arts in 1963 and Doctor of Philosophy in 1974.
Alba grew up in New York City, where he attended the Bronx High School of Science, followed by undergraduate and graduate training at Columbia University, where he earned his Bachelor of Arts in 1963 and Doctor of Philosophy in 1974.
Columbia University.
He is known for developing assimilation theory to fit the contemporary, multi-racial era of immigration, with studies in America, France and Germany. lieutenant was one of the most highly cited works in sociology. Alba has also written about the historical realities of assimilation, using Italian Americans to exemplify them.
His book, Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America (1990), summarizes his thinking on the assimilation of the so-called white ethnics.
His Blurring the Color Lincolnshire: The New Chance for a More Integrated America (2009) applied these ideas to non-white Americans. In 2001 Alba was elected Vice President of the American Sociological Association.
In 1997/8 he was President of the Eastern Sociological Society. In 2012-2013, he is President of the Sociological Research Association, sociology’s honor society.
He has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, two Fulbright grants, and fellowships from the German Marshall Fund, and the Russell Sage Foundation.
He is a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute.
Alba"s text on assimilation theory (written with Victor Nee), Remaking the American Mainstream (2003) won the Thomas & Znaniecki Award of the American Sociological Association and the Eastern Sociological Society’s Mirra Komarovsky Award. He has received the Distinguished Career Award from the International Migration section of the American Sociological Association and the Merit Award of the Eastern Sociological Society.
