You have reached the home page of Aaron Gullickson. I am currently an assistant professor in the Sociology Department at the University of Oregon.

My academic interests are in stratification and inequality, race and ethnicity, historical demography, kinship, quantitative methods, and demographic methods. I am particularly interested in the nexus of inequality, race, ethnicity, and kinship. I am currently engaged in a long-term research project examining the evolution of the one-drop rule and the stratification of mixed-race individuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Recent Publications

"Racial Boundary Formation at the Dawn of Jim Crow: The Determinants and Effects of Black/Mulatto Occupational Differences in the United States, 1880." American Journal of Sociology. 116(1): 187-231. (2010)

"Comment: An Endorsement of Exchange Theory in Mate Selection." American Journal of Sociology. 115(4): 1243-1251. (2010, with Vincent Kang Fu).

"Education and Black/White Interracial Marriage." Demography 43(4): 673-689. (2006).

"Black/White Interracial Marriage Trends, 1850-2000." Journal of Family History 31(3): 1-24. (2006)

"The Significance of Color Declines: A Re-Analysis of Skin Tone Differentials in Post-Civil Rights America." Social Forces 84(1):157-180. (2005)

"Kinship Structures and Survival: Maternal Mortality on the Croatian-Bosnian Border, 1750-1898." Population Studies 58(2):145-159. (2004 w/Eugene Hammel)

"Maternal Mortality as an Indicator of the Standard of Living in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Slavonia" in Robert C. Allen, Tommy Bengtsson, and Martin Dribe, Living Standards in the Past: New Perspectives on Well-Being in Asia and Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 277-306. (2005 w/Eugene Hammel)

Working Papers

Choosing Race: Multiracial Ancestry and Identification (with Ann Morning)

Social scientists have become increasingly interested in the racial identification choices of multiracial individuals, partly as a result of the federal government's new "check all that apply" method of racial identification. However, the majority of work to date has narrowly defined the population of multiracial individuals as the "biracial" children of single-race parents. In this article, we use the open-ended ancestry questions on the 1990 and 2000 5% samples of the U.S. Census to identify a multiracial population that is potentially broader in its understanding of multiraciality. Relative to other studies, we find stronger historical continuity in the patterns of hypodescent and hyperdescent for part-black and part-American Indian ancestry individuals respectively, while we find that multiple race identification is the modal category for those of part-Asian ancestry. These results suggest that future work on multiracial identification should pay closer attention to the history of specific multiracial ancestry groups.

Teaching