Matt Wray

Matt Wray

  • College of Liberal Arts

    Sociology

    Associate Professor Director of Undergraduate Studies

Office Location

Gladfelter Hall, 751

Expertise

Medical Sociology, Cultural Sociology, Sociology of Race & Ethnicity, Cultural Sociology

Biography

Matt Wray (Alpha chapter, Michigan, 1987) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Temple University. Prior to working at Temple, Wray was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at Harvard University. He earned his BA at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and an MA and PhD from University of California, Berkeley. He has also been a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

Wray is the author of Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (Duke, 2006) and the editor of Cultural Sociology: An Introductory Reader (WW Norton 2013); The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness (Duke, 2001); Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life (New York University Press, 1998); and White Trash: Race and Class in America (Routledge, 1997). His journal articles have appeared in American Behavioral Scientist, Social Science & Medicine, American Quarterly, Social Science Quarterly, and the Annual Review of Sociology, as well as numerous other publications.

Curriculum Vitae

Selected Publications

  • 2025, forthcoming. Wray, Matt. “Poor White People in the Eugenic Imagination.” In Hubbs, Jolene, ed. Whiteness in American Literature & Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • 2023. Rodgers-Tonge, Decorti, Matt Wray & Carey Baldwin. “Supportive Programs and Financial Aid: Measuring Their Impact on Retention of Blacks and Latinx College Students in the New England Region.” The Journal of Business Diversity. 23 (4) pp. 1-13.
  • 2023. Wray, Matt & Catherine Wolfe, “White Settler Colonialism, ‘Chromanyms,’ and the Trouble with Marginal Whites.” Rikke Andreassen et al., eds. Routledge International Handbook of New Critical Race & Whiteness Studies. London: Routledge. Pp. 406-418. ISBN: 9780367637699. DOI: 10.4324/9781003120612-42.
  • 2019. Wray, Matt. “A Typology of White People in America.” In Lia Kindiger & Mark Schmitt, eds. Intersections of Whiteness. New York: Routledge. Pp. 38-52. ISBN: 9781351112796.

Courses Taught

  • Deadly Contagions: Pandemics Past, Present, & Future
  • Putting Sociology to Work
  • Race, Science, Health & Medicine
  • Sociology on Drugs
  • Trumpism 101: Democracy, Neoliberalism, and the Rise of Populism