Spencer Headworth

Promoted to Associate Professor

Department of Sociology

sheadworth@purdue.edu

Spencer Headworth completed a Ph.D. and master’s in Sociology at Northwestern University, and a bachelor’s in Sociology and Psychology at the Bowling Green State University. He joined the Purdue faculty in 2016.

Headworth’s research and expertise lie in the areas of law, social control, inequality, organizations, and occupations. He has published nine peer-reviewed journal articles, five book chapters, a book, and an edited volume.

His research has made major contributions to social scientific understanding of how

contemporary legal and bureaucratic organizations operate and to what effect. Much of his scholarship focuses on formal social control processes and the people who define and police illegal behavior. His project on welfare fraud investigation has been the centerpiece of this line of inquiry.

He is an Affiliated Scholar of the American Bar Foundation, and the lead editor of Diversity in Practice: Race, Gender, and Class in Legal and Professional Careers.

Headworth teaches courses in law, inequality, criminal justice, and qualitative methods, and has taught within the Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts program.