William Corsaro

William A. Corsaro was Robert H. Shaffer Class of 1967 Endowed Chair and is nowProfessor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University, Bloomington,where he won the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1988. He was the firstrecipient of the Distinguished Career Award for the Section on Children and Youth ofthe American Sociological Association in 2013. He taught courses on the sociology ofchildhood, childhood in contemporary society, and ethnographic research methods.His primary research interests are the sociology of childhood, children’s peer cultures,the sociology of education, and ethnographic research methods. Corsaro is the author ofFriendship and Peer Culture in the Early Years (1985), author of “We’re Friends, Right?” InsideKids’ Culture (2003), and coauthor with Luisa Molinari of I Compagni: UnderstandingChildren’s Transition From Preschool to Elementary School (2005). He is the coeditorwith Jens Qvortrup and Michael-Sebastian Honig (2009) of The Palgrave Handbook ofChildhood Studies. Corsaro was a Fulbright Senior Research Fellow in Bologna, Italy, in1983-1984 and a Fulbright Senior Specialist Fellow in Trondheim, Norway, in 2003.He received an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University, Sweden, in 2016 and wasrecipient of the Cooley-Mead Award from the Social Psychology Section of the AmericanSociological Association in 2019.