Matthew Desmond is a professor of sociology at Princeton University. His primary teaching and research interests include urban sociology, poverty, race and ethnicity, organizations and work, social theory, and ethnography.

Desmond started studying housing, poverty, and eviction in 2008, living and working alongside poor tenants and their landlords in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Combining ethnographic fieldwork with original statistical analyses, Desmond discovered that eviction was incredibly prevalent in low-income communities and functioned as a cause, not just a condition, of poverty. This work was summarized in his book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, which won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. Desmond also launched the Eviction Lab at Princeton University in 2017, where he serves as principal investigator. In April 2018, the Eviction Lab published the first-ever dataset of millions of evictions in America, going back to 2000.

Desmond was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2015, and in 2018 he received the Stowe Prize for Writing to Advance Social Justice, awarded by the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center to authors whose work shines a light on critical social issues. In addition to Evicted, he is also the author of the award-winning book On the Fireline, the coauthor of two books on race, and the editor of a collection of studies on severe deprivation in America. He has written essays on educational inequality, dangerous work, political ideology, race and social theory, and the inner-city housing market. He is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune.