Before taking the helm of the Cultural Policy Center at NORC, Betty Farrell, who earned her Ph.D. in sociology at Harvard University, was associate director of the Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences and a senior lecturer in the Graduate Social Science Division at the University of Chicago.
Her work in historical sociology has focused on the sociology of culture, public policy, U.S. family patterns, and gender studies. She co-edited with Diane Grams, Entering Cultural Communities: Diversity and Change in the Nonprofit Arts. She is also the author of Family: The Making of an Idea, an Institution, and a Controversy in American Culture and Elite Families: Class and Power in Nineteenth-Century Boston.
Farrell also conducted research on cultural pluralism in the Chicago art world with a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities that investigated questions of access, diversity, and inclusivity across a range of Chicago's established and community-based cultural institutions.