Peter Rose was born in Rochester, New York, in 1933, grew up in central New York and in the northern Adirondacks, and attended Syracuse University (AB, 1954) and Cornell University (MA, 1957; Ph.D., 1959). He is the Sophia Smith Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Anthropology and Senior Fellow of the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute at Smith College, and a long-time member of the Graduate Faculty of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
He taught at Goucher College in Baltimore in the late 1950s and joined the Smith faculty in 1960. Over the years he served as a visiting professor at Clark, Wesleyan, the University of Colorado, UCLA, Yale, and Harvard; Fulbright Professor in England, Japan, Australia, Austria and The Netherlands; short-term guest professor at the University of Iceland, the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, and the University of Deusto in Bilbao, Spain; visiting fellow at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the Chinese Academy of Social Science in Beijing, the Rockefeller Study Center in Bellagio and the Bogliasco Foundation’s Center for Arts and Letters, both in Italy, and at the Refugee Policy Centre at Oxford University, the East-West Center in Hawaii, the Kennedy School of Politics at Harvard, and, most recently, at the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences at Stanford.
Long affiliated with institutions of higher education in The Netherlands, he was the founding chair of the Academic Advisory Board of two of the first liberal arts colleges in that country, University College Utrecht and University College Roosevelt, both international honors colleges of Utrecht University. In 1994 he received the Medal of the Universiteit van Amsterdam for his contributions to international education. In the spring of 2018 he was the Roosevelt Lecturer at the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies in Middelburg in The Netherlands and served as Roosevelt Visiting Professor at that same institution in the spring of 2019.
For over twenty years Rose has been a faculty member and fellow in various programs at the Salzburg Global Seminar in Austria and is currently a member of its American Studies Advisory Board and a core faculty of its the SGS’s affiliated organization, the Global Citizenship Alliance.
President of the Eastern Sociological Society (ESS) in the early 1990s, he was also the first president of the Massachusetts Sociological Society in the 1960s, vice president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP), a member of the Council of the American Sociological Association, and was on the editorial boards of Races and Nations, The Journal of Refugee Studies, and New Community. From 1965-1980 he was Consulting Editor in Sociology at Random House/Knopf, during which time he also edited a Random House series of “Ethnic Groups in Comparative Perspective,” and later served as principal editorial consultant to Time-Life Books for its 14 volume series, Human Behavior. He has been consultant and advisor to a number of other publishers as well as to private and governmental agencies in the U.S. and abroad on issues of desegregation, refugee policy, international scholarly exchanges and higher education. Founder of its academic program, for twenty years he was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine.
He is the author of volumes shown on the bottom of the HOME page and of several others. These and others he has written or edited are listed and described on this website under the rubric, BOOKS.
A long-time reviewer for the Christian Science Monitor, New York Newsday, Congress Monthly, and several academic journals, over the years he has published over 200 book reviews and review essays.
With a secondary career as a travel writer, he has published articles in The New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, Vermont Life, Hampshire Life, and other newspapers and magazines and a prize-winning book, With Few Reservations: Travels at Home and Abroad. For several years he was editor of SoGoNow.com and he continues to write for several other online magazines, most frequently Travelworld International.
In 2018 he became a writer of books for children and young adults. His first is titled, Max: the Sea-Dog; Conor, the Athlete, is in press.
Peter and his wife, Hedy, former Director of Education Studies at Wesleyan University, live in Northampton and Wellfleet, Massachusetts. They have two children, Lies and Dan, and two grandsons, Jordan and Robert.
Click the link below for complete curriculum vitae.