Judith Blau

Judith Blau (born April 27, 1942) is an American sociologist and professor emerita of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Most of her academic career has been devoted to teaching and writing about human rights, and she retired to Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where she continues to teach.

Judith was awarded a BA from the University of Chicago in 1964 and a MA, also from Chicago, in 1967, and a PhD in 1972, from Northwestern University.

In the early 1970s, both physics and architecture were undergoing dramatic transformation.

Physicists had early access to the internet, allowing them to participate in international scientific exchanges, in defiance of the Cold War.

Postmodernism was displacing modernism in architecture, just as postmodernism affected philosophy and art theory.

She has worked in several sociological specialties, and gradually discovered that she could wed her passion for social and economic justice with the same scholarly discipline she brought to her study of communications among scientists.

In her current research on constitutions, she has found that the U.S. is an outlier in two respects: it never ratifies human rights treaties and has not revised the Constitution's Bill of Rights.

The United States is in a small minority of states that do not recognize economic, social and cultural rights.

The US is also an outlier on economic inequality, with immense gaps between the 1 percent and the 99 percent.

Blau served on the Executive Council of the American Sociological Association, on the Board of the North Carolina chapter of ACLU, as President of the Southern Sociological Society, and was editor of Social Forces.

Blau taught at Baruch College as an assistant professor from 1973 to 1976, held a post-doctoral fellowship at Albert Einstein College of Medicine (1976–1978), taught at the State University of New York at Albany (1978–1982), and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1982–2013) where she founded and chaired the Social and Economic Justice minor within the Sociology department.

Her husband, Peter Michael Blau taught in the same department, as emeritus professor, until his death March 12, 2002.

She has two daughters, Reva Blau and Pamela Blau.

Blau also taught at Nankai University in Tienjin, China, Hunter College, New York University, Mary Baldwin College and spent an academic year at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study.

Her early career was devoted, first to a study of scientists and, then, to a study of architects.

She founded the U.S. chapter of Sociologists without Borders in 2002.

Blau served as its president from 2002 to 2011.

She was the recipient of the 2006 Lester F. Ward Award of the Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology, the 2013 annual Orange County Pauli Murray Award, and the American Sociological Association's Distinguished Career Award for the Practice of Sociology, and is a lifetime honorary member of the Cooperstown Baseball Hall of Fame.

Human Rights: Beyond the Liberal Vision, co-authored with Alberto Moncada, is a book that critiques American society.

It has been called a "brave book" by the journal Social Forces.

She founded and directed the Human Rights Center of Chapel Hill and Carrboro in 2009, which was an NGO that advocated for the rights of refugees and migrants.

https://sociology.unc.edu/files/2018/08/Judith-Blau-CV-Aug-2018.pdf