William A. Corsaro

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 resident’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.