David A. Snow

David A. Snow, distinguished professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California Irvine, studies social movements, framing processes, culture, identity formation, and socioeconomic marginality. His research and writing, which were also conducted at the University of Texas and the University of Arizona, have helped shape the understanding of protest dynamics, identity formation and mechanisms of social change.

Included among his numerous authored and co-authored articles, chapters, and books are two of the most highly cited articles in the American Sociological Review, with 50 of his articles cited at least 200 times, and his award-winning book, Down on Their Luck: A Study of Homeless Street People (with Leon Anderson). His work has made path-breaking conceptual and methodological contributions to multiple fields, including new lines of theory and research in the study of social movements, conversion and identity work, and homelessness.

He was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, President of the Pacific Sociological Association and of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, and Vice President of the American Sociological Association. He is a recipient of numerous scholarly awards, including the Society for the Study of Social Problems 2008 Lee Founders Award for career contributions to the study of social problems, the 2013 John D. McCarthy Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Scholarship of Social Movements and Collective Behavior, the 2016 George Herbert Mead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, the 2024 Aldon Morris Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Scholarship of Social Movements from the Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section of the American Sociological Association, and the American Sociological Association’s 2025 W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award, the association’s highest honor.