Allison Pugh, Ph.D.

Allison Pugh, Ph.D. is Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. Her new book, The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World, is based on a study of the standardization of work that relies on relationship.

Pugh’s research and teaching focus on how people forge connections and find meaning and dignity at home and at work, and how economic trends – from job insecurity to commodification to automation – can make that harder.  Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and has taken her from therapy sessions in Virginia to juvenile detention classrooms in California to robots in Japan.

The 2024-25 Vice President of the American Sociological Association, Pugh has been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Berggruen Institute, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and a visiting scholar in Germany, France, and Australia.

Pugh is also the author of The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity (2015), a study of the effects of job precariousness on intimate life, and the editor of Beyond the Cubicle: Job Insecurity, Intimacy and the Flexible Self (2016). Her first book, Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture (2009), won multiple best book awards and was widely reviewed.

Pugh received her A.B. in government from Harvard University, and her MA and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to her new position at Johns Hopkins, she taught at the University of Virginia for 17 years. She is a former journalist, and her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New Republic, and other outlets.