379 INTERVIEW © Sociologický ústav AV ČR, v. v. i., 2021 © Author, 2021 An Interview with Shamus R. Khan for the Czech Sociological Review ONDřEJ LáNSKý Faculty of Education, Charles University, and the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague lansky@flu.cas.cz Shamus Rahman Khan is professor of sociology and American Studies at Princeton University. He writes on culture, inequality, gender, and elites. He is the author of over 100 articles, books, and essays, includ- ing Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St Paul’s School (Prince- ton), The Practice of Research (Oxford, with Dana Fisher), Approaches to Ethnography: Modes of Representation and Analysis in Participant Obser- vation (Oxford, with Colin Jerolmack), and Sexual Citizens: Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus (W. W. Norton, with Jennifer Hirsch). He was a co-Principal Investigator of SHIFT, a multi-year study of sexual health and sexual violence at Columbia University. He directed the working group on the political infuence of economic elites at the Russell Sage Foundation, is the series editor of ‘The Middle Range’ at Columbia University Press, and served as the editor of the journal Public Culture. He writes regularly for the popular press such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and has served as a column- ist for Time magazine. In 2016 he was awarded Columbia University’s highest teaching honour, the Presidential Teaching Award, and in 2018 he was awarded the Hans L. Zetterberg Prize from Uppsala University for ‘the best sociologist under 40’. For more information, including links to his written work, see: http://shamuskhan.com. This interview took place on 18 February 2020 in Prague and Port- land, Oregon, using Skype. It was transcribed, edited, and completed in May 2020. Ondřej Lánský: You published Privilege (2011) ten years ago This book is probably your most considerable sociological work The main topic is the ethnography of St Paul’s School, which is a boarding school providing high school education that was founded in 1865 You are the son of an Irish mother and a father who was born in Pakistan Your father knew poverty before he became a physician Your parents encouraged you to be a student at St Paul’s and you later decided to conduct empirical sociological research there This kind of school prepares students for a special type of life, a life of the elite What were