Peter I. Rose, a sociologist, ethnographer, and writer, is Sophia Smith Professor Emeritus at Smith College. Over a long academic career, he has held visiting professorships at Clark, Wesleyan, UCLA, the University of Colorado, Yale, and Harvard; served as a member of the Graduate Faculty of the University of Massachusetts and as a Fulbright Senior Lecturer in England, Japan, Australia, Austria, and the Netherlands; had short-term guest appointments in Iceland, Sweden, and Spain; and enjoyed resident fellowships in Jerusalem, Beijing, Oxford, Bellagio, Bogliasco, the East-West Center in Honolulu, the Kennedy School at Harvard, the Hoover Institution, and, most recently, the Institute for Research in Social Science at Stanford and the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies in Middelburg, NL.

He is the author of The Subject Is Race, Strangers in Their Midst, Mainstream and Margins, Tempest-Tost, Guest Appearances and Other Travels in Time and Space, With Few Reservations, Mainstream and Margins Revisited, Tropes of Intolerance: Pride, Prejudice, and the Politics of Fear, and a memoir, Postmonitions of a Peripatetic Professor.