Barbara Kiviat

Barbara Kiviat is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University. She is an economic sociologist who studies how moral beliefs and other cultural understandings shape markets and justify the inequalities they produce.

She is particularly interested in how normative ideas influence the pricing and allocation of socially important resources, such as insurance, credit, and jobs. Her current project considers how these dynamics play out when corporations use massive amounts of personal data to decide what to offer to individual consumers.

Kiviat’s work has been published in American Sociological Review, Socio-Economic Review, Socius, and Social Service Review.

She has a Ph.D. in sociology and social policy from Harvard University and an M.P.A. from New York University, an M.A. in journalism from Columbia University, and a B.A. in the writing seminars from Johns Hopkins University. Previously, she was a staff writer at Time magazine.