Frederick Erickson

University of California, Los Angeles

George F. Kneller Professor, Emeritus

From 1998-2011 Frederick Erickson was George F. Kneller Professor of Anthropology of Education at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where from 2000-2006 he was director of research at the Corinne A. Seeds University Elementary School, UCLA. Since 2015 he has been Professorial Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics, Georgetown University. He received his bachelors and masters degrees in the history of music and his PhD in education at Northwestern University. His contribution to the field of anthropology of education has earned him numerous honors and awards including Spencer and Annenberg Institute for Public Policy fellowships, a Fulbright Award, and the Spindler Award for Scholarly Contributions to Educational Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association. Erickson’s writings on the microethnography of classroom and family interaction, and especially how this interaction affects disadvantaged students, continue to be widely cited. He has also written extensively on qualitative research methods for social and educational research. His most recent book, Talk and Social Theory: Ecologies of Speaking and Listening in Everyday Life (Polity Press, 2004) received an Outstanding Book Award for 2005 from the American Educational Research Association. In 1998-99 and again in 2006-07, he was a fellow in residence at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. In 2014, the Council on Anthropology and Education named in his honor its annual Outstanding Dissertation Award.