Dr. Mazelis is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice, the Director of the Gender Studies Program, an affiliated scholar at Rutgers-Camden’s Center for Urban Research and Education (CURE), a Faculty Affiliate at the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Research on Poverty, a member of the Council on Contemporary Families and of the Scholars Strategy Network; her key findings research brief can be found here and her interview with SSN’s No Jargon podcast can be found here. Dr. Mazelis served as Sociology Compass Associate Editor for the Section on Social Stratification 2020-2022 and served as the co-leader of the Scholars Strategy Network’s New Jersey/Philadelphia chapter 2018-2021. She currently serves on the Rutgers University Press Editorial Committee and the Editorial Board of Contemporary Sociology. She received her B.A. from Binghamton University of the State University of New York and her M.A. and her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Mazelis teaches Introduction to Sociology, Sociological Theory, Inequality in the United States, Urban Sociology, and Homelessness and Deep Poverty in the U.S. She was in the inaugural cohort of Civic Engagement Faculty Fellows and received a Chancellor’s Award for Academic Civic Engagement in 2012. She won a Chancellor’s Award for Diversity, Inclusion, and Community Engagement (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Leadership) in 2025.
Dr. Mazelis is passionate about using research to advance public understandings of important issues and amplifying the voices of those in poverty. In addition to her peer-reviewed scholarship, she is an award-winning public sociologist as a member of the inaugural class of 2022 Public Sociology Award recipients from the Eastern Sociological Society. Dr. Mazelis was also the winner of the 2022 Michael Harrington Award from The Poverty, Class, & Inequality Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and a recipient of the 2022 Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence at Rutgers-Camden. She has authored blog posts and brief reports for The Society Pages, the Council on Contemporary Families, and the Scholars Strategy Network. She has been a frequent source for journalists writing about poverty and related issues, and has been quoted as an expert by outlets such as The 19th, WalletHub, Today.com, NBC10 Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Politifact. Dr. Mazelis has been a guest on NPR’s The 1a, and her op-eds have appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Hill, and The Washington Post.
Dr. Mazelis has long specialized in the study of urban poverty and social ties, using qualitative interview methods to explore the meaning and understanding people have of their own situations. Her book with NYU Press, Surviving Poverty: Creating Sustainable Ties Among the Poor, is based on her research in Philadelphia. You can listen to her talk about her book in an interview with the New Books Network. She also authored an article on sustainable tie creation in a 2020 special issue of The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science: Do Networks Help People to Manage Poverty? Perspectives from the Field. She also wrote about social ties in the context of distancing during the pandemic.
She co-wrote with the Census Bureau’s Laryssa Mykyta an article that appeared in Journal of Marriage and Family on the role of marital and relationship status in financial support from kin to new parents using survey data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS). More recently, she and Mykyta authored another article in Journal of Marriage and Family using the qualitative addition to the Fragile Families study, the Time, Love, and Cash in Couples with Children Study (TLC3) to explore how new parents talk about accessing and avoiding support from family.
The Routledge Handbook of Poverty in the United States (2015), includes three contributions by Mazelis: one on social ties among the poor; one, coauthored with President of Public Agenda Andrew Seligsohn, on the consequences of deindustrialization and neoliberalism in Camden, New Jersey, the poorest city in America; and one, coauthored with Rutgers alumnus Brendan Gaughan, on poverty stigma and Occupy Wall Street rhetoric. She authored an article on reciprocity among the poor (Journal of Poverty). She also authored an Oxford Bibliographic entry: “Welfare, Race, and the American Imagination,” with Stephen Pimpare.
Dr. Mazelis is currently engaged in a research project funded by the National Science Foundation, “A New Class Divide: Student Loans and the Transition to Adulthood,” with collaborator Arielle Kuperberg, Associate Professor at University of North Carolina-Greensboro. This is a mixed methods research project exploring the role of student loan debt in the college experience and future aspirations and expectations of graduating seniors, with a longitudinal component examining their transition out of college. The authors recently published an academic blog post, a brief report and four journal articles based on their research.