He is currently Maurice P. During Professor and department chair of Sociology at Princeton University[1] and has also served as a regular Visiting Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
His first book, Slim's Table: Race, Respectability, and Masculinity, won the 1994 American Sociological Association's award for Distinguished Scholarly Publication.
He is also the author of Sidewalk (1999), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the C. Wright Mills Award.
He served on the original advisory board for Public Radio International's This American Life.
He is the step-brother of Harvard political scientist Gary King.