Max Besbris

Affiliate

Associate Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Discipline Sociology
Research Areas Environment, Methodology, Mobility, Race and Ethnicity, Social Interactions
Department Website
I study how housing markets, the environment, and patterns of residential mobility reproduce socio-spatial inequality.

Max Besbris was born and raised in Los Angeles and completed his B.A. at UC Berkeley. Before graduate school, he worked as a researcher in a neurology lab at UCSF, studying neurodegeneration and speech ability. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from NYU in 2017 and then wrote a book, Upsold (Chicago, 2020), based off his dissertation. The book is about real estate agents and their effects on the housing market. His second book, Soaking the Middle Class (Russell Sage, 2022), is about how inequality emerges after a climate-related disaster. He is currently working on various projects including ones that examine 1) the structure of the market for rental housing in the metropolitan U.S., 2) the relationship between climate change and residential mobility, 3) and the relationships between housing and various health outcomes.