David A. Snow

David A.Snow is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. He taught previously at Southern Methodist University (1975-76), the University of Texas, Austin (1976-1987), and the University of Arizona (1977-2001), where he was department head for almost a decade. He earned a BA from Ohio University, an MA in Urban Studies from the University of Akron, and a PhD from UCLA.

His teaching and researching interests have concentrated on collective behavior and social movements, socioeconomic marginality and homelessness, social psychology with a focus on framing processes, identity, and conversion, and ethnographic field methods. He has published numerous articles and chapters on these topics as well as 12 academic books.

Dr. Snow is past President of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, the Pacific Sociological Association, and Vice President of the American Sociological Association. He is the recipient of numerous scholarly awards, including the American Sociological Association's 2025 W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award, the association's highest honor. He was also recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He is a veteran who served in the U.S. Army in the late 1960s and was employed afterwards for a year as a Juvenile Parole Officer prior to initiating his graduate studies. He was married for 37 years to his late wife,Judy, who succumbed to a long battle with cancer, and has been with his current wife, Roberta, for the past 20 years. He has three children and four grandchildren. In addition to relishing the time he spends with family, he enjoys reading widely, cooking, particularly French and Italian cuisine, lap swimming, walking, listening to music of all kinds, and appreciates art and traveling and hanging out with Roberta.