Eleanor Palo Stoller joined the WFU Sociology Department as a Research Professor in September, 2005. She moved to North Carolina from Cleveland, Ohio, where she was the Selah Chamberlain Professor of Sociology at Case Western Reserve University. As an undergraduate, she majored in American Studies at Grinnell College. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Washington University.

Professor Stoller is interested in the ways in which older people and their families manage frailty and disease in late life, especially the contributions of women as unpaid providers of health care. One strand of this research explores the impact of people’s lay understandings of disease on their strategies for living with chronic disease. Another strand focuses on the roles of gender, ethnicity and migration history in shaping elderly people’s informal networks.

Dr. Stoller has taught a range of undergraduate and graduate courses, including Medical Sociology, Aging and the Life Course, Gender, Work and Family, and Research Methods. An underlying theme of all of her research and teaching is the impact of systems of inequality, particularly those based on gender, race/ethnicity, and social class, on the experience of growing old. This approach is incorporated into Worlds of Difference: Inequality and the Aging Experience, co-authored with Rose Campbell Gibson.