Education & Degrees
Ph.D. University of Texas at Austin
M.A. University of Texas at Austin
B.A. University of Chicago
Expertise Areas: Poverty and Inequality, Urban Sociology, Ethnography
Bio
Esther Sullivan is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado Denver. She is currently a Nonresident Fellow in the Housing Policy Finance Center at the Urban Institute. Her research focuses on poverty, environmental inequality, legal regulation, and the built environment, with a special interest in housing. A large portion of her research investigates the intersecting environmental, financial, and legal inequalities that impact residents of manufactured housing and manufactured home communities. Her book Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans' Tenuous Right to Place (winner of the 2019 Robert Park Award) examines the sociolegal, geospatial, and market forces that create housing insecurity for residents in U.S. manufactured home parks. She was named a University of Colorado Denver Chancellor’s Urban Engaged Scholar for her community-engaged scholarship.
Courses Taught
SOCY 2023 Poverty & Inequality
SOCY 3001 Urban Sociology
SOCY 3140 Sociological Theory
SOCY 4440 Poverty & Inequality Seminar
SOCY 5016 Social Theory
Selected Works and Experience
"Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans' Tenuous Right to Place," University of California Press, 2018
“The sphere of exposure: Centering user experience in community science air monitoring,” published in Frontiers in Environmental Science, 2024
"You Don't Need Zoning to be Exclusionary: Manufactured Home Parks, Land-use Regulations and Housing Segregation in the Houston Metropolitan Area,"published in Land Use Policy 123, 2022
"Personal, Not Real: Manufactured Housing Insecurity, Real Property, and the Law," published in Annual Review of Law and Social Science, vol. 18 issue 1, 01/2022
"Mobile Home Parks and Disasters: Understanding Risk and the Third Housing Type in the US," published in Natural Hazards Review 21(2), 2022
“Displaced in Place: Manufactured housing, mass eviction, and the paradox of state intervention,” published in American Sociological Review 82 (2), 2017