Matt Wray, associate professor of sociology at Temple University, is the author of Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness and is co-editor of White Trash: Race and Class in America, Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life, and The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness.

His research and teaching interests include medical sociology, race and ethnicity, cultural sociology, and public sociology. Wray is also affiliated faculty in the American Studies Program at Temple.

As a 2006-2008 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at Harvard University, Wray examined the racial and spatial heterogeneity of suicide rates in the American West, with a particular emphasis on Las Vegas, the city with the highest metropolitan suicide rate in the U.S.

Wray treats suicide rates as important measures of population health, because they reflect dimensions of health missed by narrow biomedical models: namely, the social and cultural health of groups and communities. Especially in times and places of rapid social transformation, the study of suicide can expose hidden health and mortality effects of social isolation and dislocation. Wray is currently at work on a book devoted to this topic.

In addition to his more recent work on suicide, Wray has researched multiple aspects of white identity, particularly the stigmatyping of poor rural whites. He is also a long-time participant observer of the Burning Man Festival, an arts festival in northern Nevada.

Wray’s work has been featured in The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal, among dozens of other national and international publications, and he has been interviewed on numerous television and radio shows, including Freakonomics Radio.