Maureen Eger

Maureen A. Eger is an Associate Professor of Sociology. Her research focuses on political sociology, with particular emphasis on international migration, nationalism, and the welfare state. She examines sociopolitical attitudes and behaviors—including social policy preferences, voting, and party dynamics—across diverse demographic, institutional, and economic contexts. Much of her theoretical and empirical work focuses on reactions to immigration and how these responses become politically consequential, shaping public opinion, electoral behavior, and public policy. More recently, she analyzes how these dynamics shape the experiences of immigrants. Her research is primarily quantitative, drawing on extensive experience in survey design, administration, and analysis, as well as the construction of original contextual-level datasets from publicly available sources.

Eger’s research appears in peer-reviewed journals such as The British Journal of Sociology, European Sociological Review, European Political Science, International Migration Review, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, JAMA, Nations and Nationalism, and PNAS. Her co-edited and co-authored book, Migration Stigma, was recently published by MIT Press. Her research has been discussed in The New York Times and Pacific Standard and cited in outlets such as Forbes, Business Insider, and The Conversation.

As a principal investigator or co-investigator, she has helped secure over $3.75 million in research grants from various funding agencies, including the Swedish Research Council and the Wallenberg Family Foundation.

In service to the discipline, she has reviewed for five national research councils and completed over 125 peer reviews across more than 40 academic journals. She has also served on the editorial board of the American Sociological Review (2023-2025) and Journal of Right-Wing Studies (since 2021).

Prior to joining USC in 2026, Eger was an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Umeå University. Previously, she was a Fulbright Fellow in Sweden (Stockholm University) and a 2024–25 Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She has also been a visiting scholar at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis at Stanford University and at the Center for Right-Wing Studies at the University of California Berkeley. Eger holds a Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of Washington and an M.A. and B.A. from Stanford University.

• Ph.D. Sociology, University of Washington, 2010
• M.A. Sociology, University of Washington, 2005
• M.A. Sociology, Stanford University, 2000
• A.B. Psychology, Stanford University, 1999