You have reached the home page of Aaron Gullickson. I am currently an assistant professor in the Sociology Department at the University of Oregon.

My academic interests are in stratification and inequality, race and ethnicity, historical demography, kinship, quantitative methods, and demographic methods. I am particularly interested in the nexus of inequality, race, ethnicity, and kinship. I am currently engaged in a long-term research project examining the evolution of the one-drop rule and the stratification of mixed-race individuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Recent Publications

"Comment: An Endorsement of Exchange Theory in Mate Selection." American Journal of Sociology (Forthcoming, expected September 2008).

"Education and Black/White Interracial Marriage." Demography 43(4): 673-689. (2006).

"Black/White Interracial Marriage Trends, 1850-2000." Journal of Family History 31(3): 1-24. (2006)

"The Significance of Color Declines: A Re-Analysis of Skin Tone Differentials in Post-Civil Rights America." Social Forces 84(1):157-180. (2005)

"Kinship Structures and Survival: Maternal Mortality on the Croatian-Bosnian Border, 1750-1898." Population Studies 58(2):145-159. (2004 w/Eugene Hammel)

"Maternal Mortality as an Indicator of the Standard of Living in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Slavonia" in Robert C. Allen, Tommy Bengtsson, and Martin Dribe, Living Standards in the Past: New Perspectives on Well-Being in Asia and Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 277-306. (2005 w/Eugene Hammel)

Working Papers

The Determinants of Black/Mulatto Occupational Differentiation at the Dawn of Jim Crow

(Revision of American Sociological Association Conference Paper) In cross-national studies of race in the Americas, one of the key questions has been why the United States failed to develop and sustain an intermediate racial group between black and white. Prior research has frequently focused on the role of miscegenation, relative population size, and status competition. This article explores these issues at the intranational level by exploiting regional variation in the United States in the degree of occupational differentiation between blacks and mulattoes during the transitionary period from slavery to freedom. The analysis reveals that status competition played a key role in differentiating blacks from mulattoes in the U.S. South. Black/mulatto occupational differentiation was greatest in areas where whites had a high level of occupational prestige. Furthermore, the effect of black/mulatto occupational differentiation on lynching varied by the occupational status of whites. In areas dominated by low-status whites, black/mulatto differentiation increased the risk of lynching, while in areas containing more high-status whites, black/mulatto differentiation decreased the risk of lynching.

Teaching