Sociology
College of Liberal Arts
Twin Cities
Award Year
2023
University Award
McKnight Presidential Fellow Award
Research Title
New ways to understand racial inequity in disease and death
No Monument Location
Elizabeth Wrigley-Field studies racism and mortality in the United States in two settings: the early twentieth century and the Covid-19 pandemic. Some of her work puts mortality inequities into new perspective with surprising comparisons; for example, she showed that, during the Covid-19 pandemic, white mortality was still not as high as Black mortality has been every year, long before the pandemic. She also helped lead an award-winning community Covid-19 vaccination program (based in Minneapolis’s Seward neighborhood). Her work has been widely covered in national and local media and has won more than a dozen national and international awards.