David Stark

David Stark is the Arthur Lehman Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Columbia University. He received his BA, summa cum laude, from Princeton University in 1972, and his PhD in Sociology from Harvard University in 1982. From 1998-2001 and then from 2008-11, he was the Chair of the Department of Sociology at Columbia. He has also taught at the University of Wisconson, Cornell University, and Harvard University. He has held multiple visiting positions at various universities, most recently as a Visiting Fellow at the Copenhagen Business School in Spring 2013. He was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2002.

Professor Stark's most recent work was most thoroughly examined in his book The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life. This work examines alternative ways to establish value as a measure of economic worth, looking at three case studies in which businesses encountered rapid, and sometimes disorienting, change. His current research looks at large sets of data as he searches for the social origins of creativity. He recently co-authored the book This Place, These People: Life and Shadow on the Great Plains, which examines though photo essays and transcribed interviews the disappearance of rural living spaces in the American Midwest.