Bio

Robert Vargas is an urban sociologist at the University of Notre Dame. His research examines how politics and government policies shape the conditions of urban areas. His research has focused predominantly on urban violence and health care. His book “Wounded City” (Oxford University Press), describes how violence persists on a handful of blocks within Chicago as a result of conflict over political turf between the Democratic Party and independent political groups. The project brings a political framework for understanding the geographic concentration of violence in urban areas. Prior to Notre Dame, Robert was on the sociology department faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy at Harvard University.