G.T. Marx is a Professor Emeritus who has worked in the areas of race and ethnicity, collective behavior and social movements, law and society and surveillance studies. He is the author of Protest and Prejudice, Undercover: Police Surveillance in America,Collective Behavior and Social Movements (with Doug McAdam) and editor of Racial Conflict, Muckraking Sociology, Undercover: Police Surveillance in Comparative Perspective (with C. Fijnaut) and other books. With Norman Goodman, he revised Society Today and edited Sociology: Popular and Classical Approaches.Undercover received the Outstanding Book Award from the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences and Marx was named the American Sociological Association’s Jensen Lecturer for 1989-1990.
He received the Distinguished Scholar Award from its section on Crime, Law and Deviance, the Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association, the Bruce C. Smith Award for research achievement, the W.E.B. Dubois medal, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems. In 1992 he was the inaugural Stice Memorial Lecturer in residence at the University of Washington and he has been a UC Irvine Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellow, the A.D. Carlson Visiting Distinguished Professor in the Social Sciences at West Virginia University, and the Hixon-Riggs Visiting Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Harvey Mudd College. Major works in progress are books on new forms of surveillance and social control across borders. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.
In recent decades he has been working on surveillance issues, illustrating how and why surveillance is neither good nor bad, but context and comportment make it so. He has sought to create a conceptual map of new ways of collecting, analyzing, communicating and using personal information.