Claude S. Fischer arrived at Berkeley in 1972 with an undergraduate degree from UCLA and a Ph.D. from Harvard. Most of his early research focused on the social psychology of urban life—how and why rural and urban experiences differ—and on social networks, both coming together in To Dwell Among Friends: Personal Networks in Town and City (1982). In recent years, he has worked on American social history, beginning with a study of the early telephone's place in social life, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (1992). Along the way, Fischer has worked on other topics, including writing a book on inequality with five Berkeley colleagues, Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth (1996). Fischer was also the founding editor of Contexts, the American Sociological Association's magazine of sociology for the general reader, and its executive editor through 2004. Fischer has recently co-authored a social historical book, Fischer and Hout, Century of Difference: How America Changed in the Last One Hundred Years (Russell Sage, 2006), which describes the shrinking of old divisions and the widening of new ones among Americans over the twentieth century. He is currently writing another social historical book which analyzes the evolution of American culture and character from the colonial period to the end of the 20th century. Fischer has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in urban sociology, research methods, and American society, and seminars on topics ranging from professional writing to the sociology of consumption.