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                         David Spener              

Welcome to the home page of David Spener, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.  Dr. Spener received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Texas-Austin in 1995 and  joined the Trinity faculty in 1997. In the spring of 2002, he received Trinity University's Junior Faculty Award for Distinguished Teaching and Research.   

Professor Spener's areas of scholarly  expertise include comparative international development, economic sociology, social inequality,  international migration, and border studies. His latest book,  Free Trade and Uneven Development: The North American Apparel Industry after NAFTA (edited with Gary Gereffi and Jennifer Bair) was published by Temple University Press in the summer of 2002.  

Spener's work on migration and border studies has been published widely.  His book The U.S.-Mexico Border: Transcending Divisions, Contesting Identities (with Kathleen Staudt, co-editor), was issued in 1998 by Lynne Rienner Publishers.  He has written  articles, essays, and reviews  for a variety of scholarly journals, including Social Forces, the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, the American Journal of Sociology, the Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, the Harvard Educational Review,  the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and Espiral: Estudios de Estado y Sociedad.

Spener's work has also appeared in a number of edited volumes, including Latin America in the World Economy (1996 Praeger), Wall Around the West (2000 Rowman & Littlefield), Global Human Smuggling: Comparative Perspectives (2001 The Johns Hopkins University Press), Ethnography at the Border (2003 from the University of Minnesota Press), and Más allá de la ciudad letrada: Crónicas y espacios urbanos (2003 Biblioteca de América). 

In the Department of Sociology and Anthropology,  Spener teaches courses on race and ethnic relations, social theory, U.S.-Mexico border studies, and international development.  A fluent Spanish-speaker, he also teaches in and has served on the coordinating committee of  the Languages Across the Curriculum component of  Trinity's International Studies Program.  In addition to his teaching responsibilities, Dr. Spener has served on the faculty senate and sponsored the department's Sociology Club.

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