Dr. Matthew Desmond will visit the OCU campus on Tuesday, September 12 as the 2023 Martha Jean Lemon Distinguished Speaker. A student event will be held at 1:00 p.m. and a public talk will take place at 7:00 p.m. More information about the event will be released this summer.

DR. MATTHEW DESMOND—MacArthur “Genius” and Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond is the author of The New York Times bestseller and 2017 Pulitzer Prize winner Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City and the newly released book Poverty, by America. Praised as “an extraordinary feat of reporting and ethnography” by The Washington Post, Evicted transforms our understanding of extreme poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving a uniquely American problem. Desmond is the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology, and launched The Eviction Lab (www.evictionlab.org) at Princeton University after conversations with renters and policymakers convinced him that collecting national data on eviction would help answer fundamental questions about residential instability, forced moves, and poverty in America. In 2018, The Eviction Lab published the first-ever national dataset of evictions in America, collecting millions of data points going back to 2000, and it has gone on to serve as a resource hub for the millions of American renters who faced increased housing insecurity due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Desmond is a New York Times Magazine contributing writer, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the New Yorker and The Chicago Tribune.

http://www.lyceumagency.com/speakers/matthew-desmond/