The Department of Sociology invites you to a celebration of the completion of Studies in Transgression Series by Terry Williams, Professor of Sociology, a biographer of New York City’s social worlds, and the author of thirteen books.

Beneath the surface of Manhattan’s Riverside Park run railroad tunnels, disused for decades, where over the years unhoused people have taken shelter. The sociologist Terry Williams ventured into the tunnel residents’ world, seeking to understand life on the margins and out of sight. He visited the tunnels between West Seventy- Second and West Ninety-Sixth Streets hundreds of times from 1991 to 1996, when authorities cleared them out to make way for Amtrak passenger service, and again between 2000 and 2020. “Each venture into the tunnel brings about the same feelings: as soon as I hit the stairs and start down into the darkness, I feel that I am entering something dangerous. Even when the residents become my friends, the fear is still present every time I go down. I realize now that the fear is not of the tunnel per se, but of something inside me. That’s when I develop this notion that the tunnel is the unconscious mind
of the City.” 

Life Underground: Encounters with People Below the Streets of New York, Williams' latest book, charts a dispossessed space of New York City. The story he tells is not only about the specific people living in this underground but about those living a shelterless life in the city. Every person underground is linked within a web of overlapping social worlds, above and below the ground. By delineating these social networks, Life Underground, through distinctive ethnographic eye and deep empathy, Williams provides an understanding of what life under below the surface entails.