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Carolyn Liebler

Protrait: Carolyn Liebler

Assistant Professor
Ph.D. 2001 University of Wisconsin, Madison
Room 1148 Social Sciences
Phone: 612-626-7252
Email: liebler@umn.edu

Curriculum Vitae

Interest Areas

Race and Ethnicity; Social Demography; Social Stratification; Indigenous Peoples; Sociology of the Family and Life Course; Social Support.

Selected Current Research

Prof. Liebler is fascinated by the translation of individuals’ racial identities into their answers to standardized questions about race, as well as the ways in which these answers are grouped to form the statistics used by social scientists and policy makers.  Several of her ongoing research projects address aspects of the process of translation from racial identities of individuals to race statistics describing a society, a process which is complicated by changes in identities and changes in questionnaire wording and the social history of the places in which these identities develop.

The Minnesota Research Data Center is providing the best available data for Prof. Liebler to study: Why do some people answer the new race question differently than might be expected? What are the characteristics of people who have especially fluid answers to census questions about race?

In other projects, she is investigating interracial marriage and the intergenerational transmission of race across 160 years in the US. In collaboration with two non-academic organizations, Prof. Liebler is gathering the stories of interracially adopted adult American Indians, and placing them in comparison to stories provided by other adult adoptees.

Selected Publications

"A Group in Flux: Multiracial American Indians and the Social Construction of Race." 2010. Pp. 131-144 in Multiracial Americans and Social Class: The Influence of Social Class on Racial Identity, edited by K. O. Korgen. New York and Oxford: Routledge Press.

“Homelands and Indigenous Identities in a Multiracial Era.” 2010. Social Science Research 39:596-609.

“A Practical Approach to Using Multiple-Race Response Data: A Bridging Method for Public-Use Microdata," with Andrew Halpern-Manners. 2008. Demography 45(1):143-155.

“Pondering Poi Dog: The Importance of Place to the Racial Identification of Mixed-Race Native Hawaiians," with Shawn Malia Kana'iupuni. 2005. Ethnic and Racial Studies 28(4)687-721.