Department of Sociology

Eliza Pavalko is the Allen D. and Polly S. Grimshaw professor of Sociology. Her research interests lie in the areas of the sociology of the life course, aging, health, work, gender and social change. With funding from the National Institute on Aging and National Institute of Mental Health and in collaboration with numerous graduate students and colleagues, her attention has centered on paid and unpaid work careers, health trajectories and how they are framed within institutional policies and practices, historical context and gender regimes. She has three streams of work that address these issues in different ways. The first focuses on paid and unpaid work across the life course and implications of both types of labor for health. Early work focused on these relationships among women, while current work examines how paid work and family shapes the health and mortality of both men and women. A second line of work examines social change in women's paid and unpaid work, and the consequences of these changes for women and families health and well-being. A third line of work examines how institutional policies affect work, family and health careers. Much of this work has focused on work-family policies and caregiving, while earlier work examined how mental changing mental health policy in the U.S. has shaped mental illness careers. Selected publications from these lines of work are listed below.

Eliza is currently vice provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs. She has served as editor of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior (2008-2010), secretary-treasurer and then section chair for the ASA Section on Aging and the Life Course, and was director of graduate studies (2001-2004). She has also received several teaching honors including the Indiana University Trustees Teaching Award and the Graduate Student Mentor Award. Eliza received her M.S. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Florida State University and was a NIA Postdoctoral Trainee at the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina.