Frederick F. Wherry

Frederick “Fred” Wherry is the Vice-Dean for Diversity and Inclusion in the Office of the Dean of Faculty and the Townsend Martin, Class of 1917 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, where he is also an affiliated faculty member in African-American Studies. He is currently writing a book What Debtors Deserve (under contract at Crown Publishing). He founded the Debt Collection Lab (debtcollectionlab.org) and the Dignity + Debt Network (dignityanddebt.org) where he works on issues of economic justice. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of nine books, including Credit Where It’s Due: Rethinking Financial Citizenship (with Kristin Seefeldt and Anthony Alvarez), The Oxford Handbook of Consumption (with Ian Woodward), and Money Talks (with Nina Bandelj and Viviana Zelizer). He was president of the Eastern Sociological Society and the Social Science History Association. In 2022 he was appointed to the Wealth Disparity Task Force by Governor Murphy. At Stanford University Press, he co-edits the book series Culture and Economic Life.

He received his PhD and MPA from Princeton University and his BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he was a Morehead-Cain Scholar. Before joining the Princeton faculty, he served on the faculty at Yale, Columbia, and Michigan.