Distinguished Faculty Lectures Series: Matt Wray, Associate Professor, Sociology, Temple University

In 2015, American suicide rates hit a thirty-year high. This fact, along with rising rates of alcohol and drug abuse, is the main reason that life expectancy for whites has begun to decline. This rising trend in self-destruction started well before the recent recession, and, in this talk, Wray traces the forces and factors behind what public health officials are calling "our new national epidemic." Wray focuses his analysis on Las Vegas--the American city with the highest suicide rate, as ground zero of the epidemic--a desert crucible that forged new forms of social isolation and personal despair that are now widespread thrughout America.

Matt Wray is Associate Professor, Sociology at Temple University. A graduate of University of California, Berkeley, he has had postdoctoral fellowships at the Smithsonian Institution and Harvard University. His research interests focus on health, culture, and race. Wray is completing a book about suicide and self-destruction in the American West, drawing attention to the various forms of isolation and freedom peculiar to the swath of western states that make up the American Suicide Belt. Previously he has published books about the stigmatyping of poor rural whites. His journal articles have appeared in Social Science and Medicine, American Behavioral Scientist, and Annual Review of Sociology. He is a former editor at Contexts and current contributing editor at PublicBooks.org