Peggy Levitt, is Chair and Associate Professor of Sociology, Wellesley College and Co-Director of the Transnational Studies Initiative and Research Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University.

She is a leader in establishing and developing the field of transnational migration studies, starting with her first book on Dominican migration networks to the U.S., The Transnational Villagers (University of California Press, 2001), which won honorable mentions from the American Sociological Association's section on International Migration and New England Council on Latin American Studies.

Her second book, God Needs No Passport: How Immigrants are Changing the American Religious Landscape (New Press, 2007), is an engaging multi-sited ethnography of the religious orientations of four immigrant communities she studied in Massachusetts, and their homeland communities in India, Brazil, Ireland, and Pakistan. Her most recent book is The Transnational Studies Reader: Intersections and Innovations, co-edited with Sanjeev Khagram (Routledge, 2008).

Peggy Levitt's research has won support from the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Mellon, and the Social Science Research Council and as a MacArthur Fellow at Harvard. She is involved with two transnational civil society networks on research and advocacy, one based around Europe and one based around Latin America.