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Viviana A. Rotman Zelizer (born January 19, 1946) is an American sociologist and the Lloyd Cotsen '50 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. She is an economic sociologist who focuses on the attribution of culture and morality meaning to the economy. A constant theme in her work is the economic valuation of the sacred, as found in such contexts as life insurance settlements and economic transactions between sexual intimates. In 2006, she was elected to the PEN American Center. In 2007, she was elected to both the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
She attended Rutgers University, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa, with a B.A. in 1971. She went on to graduate school in sociology at Columbia University where she received an MPhil, an M.A. in 1974, and a Ph.D. in sociology in 1977.
Zelizer has named four scholars at Columbia, who influenced her intellectual career: Sigmund Diamond, Bernard Barber, David Rothman, and Robert K. Merton. Diamond (whose PhD was in history) and Barber were her primary mentors in sociology, and Rothman in the history department. Zelizer has said that Merton was always present, but at a distance.
I remember all too painfully an early interview for a job in a university sociology department during which my interrogators asked pointedly how my social historical research qualified as sociology at all.
From 1976 to 1978, she joined the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University. In 1976, she took an assistant professorship at Barnard College and Graduate Faculty of Columbia University. She advanced to full professor in 1985. She then returned to Columbia University as a full professor, where she chaired the Department of Sociology from 1992 to 1996. In 2002, she was named the Lloyd Cotsen '50 Professor of Sociology.
From 1987 to 1988, she was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, where she met another visiting scholar, sociologist Charles Tilly. At Princeton, she interacted with influential colleagues Paul DiMaggio and Alejandro Portes, as well as Michael Katz, then at the University of Pennsylvania.
In 1996–1997, Zelizer was a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study.
In 2001, she was elected the first chair of the newly created Economic Sociology section of the American Sociological Association. In 2001, she was elected a member of the Council of the section on Comparative/Historical Sociology of the ASA.
In 2003, the Economic Sociology section named its annual book prize the Viviana A. Zelizer Distinguished Book Award.
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