Tristan Ivory

Tristan Ivory is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Labor and Work in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. He received his PhD in 2015 from the Department of Sociology at Stanford University and then completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society at Indiana University before serving as an Assistant Professor of Black Studies and Sociology at the University of Missouri from 2017 to 2019.

Tristan is primarily a scholar of mobility and inequality within constrained labor markets across the globe. His earliest research program examined how Sub-Saharan African migrants navigate mobility and belonging in urban Japan. Tristan's second major research project is a longitudinal survey and interview project that assesses how resource inequality affects the educational, economic, and social mobility of a cohort of high school students in Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa. He has also developed two separate streams of demographic inquiry with multiple co-authors. The first stream seeks to quantify the extent to which marriage to native-born individuals affects the labor market outcomes of first-generation migrants across multiple Global North societies while the second stream uses cross-national censuses and labor force data to investigate the presence of labor market advantage (as measured by occupational status) in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, a finding directly opposite of persistent labor market disadvantage across many countries in the Global North.