William A. Corsaro was Robert H. Shaffer Class of 1967 Endowed Chair and is now
Professor 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 first
recipient of the Distinguished Career Award for the Section on Children and Youth of
the American Sociological Association in 2013. He taught courses on the sociology of
childhood, 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 of
Friendship and Peer Culture in the Early Years (1985), author of “We’re Friends, Right?” Inside
Kids’ Culture (2003), and coauthor with Luisa Molinari of I Compagni: Understanding
Children’s Transition From Preschool to Elementary School (2005). He is the coeditor
with Jens Qvortrup and Michael-Sebastian Honig (2009) of The Palgrave Handbook of
Childhood Studies. Corsaro was a Fulbright Senior Research Fellow in Bologna, Italy, in
1983-1984 and a Fulbright Senior Specialist Fellow in Trondheim, Norway, in 2003.
He received an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University, Sweden, in 2016 and was
recipient of the Cooley-Mead Award from the Social Psychology Section of the American
Sociological Association in 2019.
