C. Matthew Snipp

C. Matthew Snipp is an American sociologist and demographer. He is currently the Burnet C. and Mildred Finley Wohlford Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. Snipp has made contributions to the field of race and ethnicity studies, particularly in understanding the social dynamics of racial and ethnic classification, and racial inequality.

Snipp has conducted research on the measurement of race and ethnicity, focusing on the complexities and implications of racial categorization in the United States. His work explores topics such as racial identity, racial formation, and the social and political consequences of racial classification. His research has had an impact on the field of sociology, demography, and race and ethnicity studies. His work has contributed to understanding of the complexities of racial and ethnic identities and their implications for individuals and society as a whole.

Early career
After completing his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1981, Snipp joined the Sociology department at the University of Maryland—College Park as an assistant professor. There he began his research focusing on the demography of American Indians and Alaska Natives. Social theorists had long believed that racial divisions were fluid and malleable over time and space. Others argued that while ethnicity in American society was becoming fleeting and ephemeral, racial boundaries were deeply inscribed and immutable in the United States. Snipp’s research provided empirical evidence that a group widely considered a distinctive racial group—American Indians and Alaska Natives—displayed exceptional population growth that could only be explained by persons changing their self-identified racial heritage from one census to the next. Other scholars later made similar findings for other groups as well, cementing the idea that race and ethnicity were social characteristics that could be dynamic and volatile across time and space. In 1989, Snipp authored the first comprehensive book-length study of American Indian and Alaska Native demography published as American Indians: the First of This Land. The book covered a range of topics including Native American population history, identity, and socioeconomic well-being.

Later career
In 1988, Snipp moved to the Rural Sociology department (now the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he continued to study American Indian and Alaska Native demography and sociology. Snipp moved to Stanford University in 1996 where his research interests broadened to include subjects like racial measurement, and economic inequality across a range of different racial and ethnic groups. From 2008 to 2011, Snipp served as the director of Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies on Race and Ethnicity. In 2013, Snipp and a Stanford colleague, David Grusky launched a project that would become known as The American Opportunity Study (AOS). The AOS aimed to study social mobility by linking decennial census files from 1940 to the present. As a proof-of-concept demonstration project involving many collaborators, the AOS showed how advances in computer technology made possible a once unthinkable project. This project was subsequently incorporated into the U.S. Census Bureau’s research and development program, and renamed the Decennial Census Digitization and Linkage Project. Since 2019, Snipp has been serving as the Vice Provost for Faculty Development, Diversity and Engagement.