Michelle D. Byng is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Temple University. Her research focuses on theories of race and racism, race and ethnic relations, and identity construction, particularly in the experiences of Muslim Americans. Her theoretical and empirical articles have been published in Critical Sociology, Sociological Forum, Sociological Inquiry, and Social Problems.
Courtney Carter is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and African American Studies Program at Mississippi State University. She examines racial ideology in organizations with a focus on Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Her current research focuses on the contested significance of blackness among HBCU stakeholders. Her research on HBCU leadership appears in the Journal of Black Studies and Education Science. She is a research affiliate with The Center for Minority-Serving Institutions at the University of Pennsylvania and the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan. Carter also serves as Coordinator of the Critical Race Studies Group at Mississippi State University.
David Cunningham is Professor of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis, MO. His current research focuses on the causes, sequencing, and legacy of racial and ethnic contention, and has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. His latest book, Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-Era’s Largest KKK, was published by Oxford University Press in 2013 and served as the basis for a PBS American Experience documentary of the same name. A recipient of Brandeis University’s Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer ’69 and Joseph Neubauer Prize for Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring, he has directed a number of community-based student programs that have provided research support for restorative justice efforts focused on the legacy of racial violence.
Sarah Cote Hampson is an Assistant Professor of Public Law in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Tacoma. Dr. Hampson received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Connecticut in 2014, and her research focuses on gender and U.S. law and public policy from a sociolegal perspective. Her first book, The Balance Gap: Working Mothers and the Limits of the Law, was published in 2017 by Stanford University Press.
Davia Downey is the MPA Program Coordinator and Assistant Professor of Public Administration at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She currently teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in local politics, public policy, and public administration. Recent publications include, “Civic Culture in Ottawa: The Endurance of Local Culture, co-authored with Laura A. Reese and Raymond Rosenfeld can be seen in Comparative Civic Culture published by Ashgate Publishing in 2012; “Disaster Recovery in Black and White: A Comparison of New Orleans and Gulfport” in the American Review of Public Administration; and an edited book, Cities and Disasters (Taylor & Francis/CRC Press) published in 2015.
Kevin Drakulich is Associate Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University. His research examines neighborhood social processes related to race, crime, and justice, as well as perceptions of race, crime, and justice both within neighborhoods and more broadly. He was named a 2014 W. E. B. Du Bois Fellow by the National Institute of Justice, which included funding for a project on implicit bias and perceptions of crime and justice. He was also the recipient of the 2014 “New Scholar Award” from the American Society of Criminology’s Division of People of Color and Crime.
Andrew Grant-Thomas is the Director of Programs at the Proteus Fund, where he works on issues that include race and redistricting; money in politics; civil liberties, human rights, and national security policy; death penalty abolition; and social equity in philanthropy. Andrew was previously with the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University and later served as Deputy Director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University. He earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Literature from Yale University, his Masters in International Relations from the University of Chicago, and his PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago.
John Hagan is John D. MacArthur Professor of Sociology and Law at Northwestern University, Co-Director of the Center on Law and Globalization at the American Bar Foundation, and lead author with Joshua Kaiser and Anna Hanson of Iraq and the Crimes of Aggressive War recently published by Cambridge University Press.
Devon Johnson is an Associate Professor of Criminology, Law, and Society at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Her recent research examines public opinion on crime policy and perceptions of police legitimacy in the United States and the Caribbean. She is co-editor of the volume Deadly Injustice: Trayvon Martin, Race, and the Criminal Justice System (2015, NYU Press). She received a PhD in Sociology from UCLA and has received awards for her research from the American Association for Public Opinion Research and the Law and Society Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Prior to her appointment at Mason, she was a research associate at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University and a research fellow at the Center for the Study of Urban Poverty at UCLA.
James R. Jones is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of African American and African Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. He received his PhD in Sociology from Columbia University. His research investigates the role race plays in organizing American political institutions and the mechanisms that (re)produce inequality within them. In addition, he studies the social experiences of African-American professionals in government to not only see inequality, but also to explicate the relationship between race and power in state institutions.
Maria Krysan is Professor and Department Head (Sociology) in the Department of Sociology and the Institute of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on racial residential segregation and racial attitudes. Her investigations of these substantive issues often connect to methodological questions about how to study this sensitive area of social life. She combines standard closed-ended survey analysis with survey-based experiments, analyses of open-ended survey questions, focus groups, and in-depth interviews. She is co-author (with H. Schuman, L. Bobo, and C. Steeh) of Racial Attitudes in America: Trends and Interpretations. Her articles have appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Social Problems, Social Science Research, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, City and Community, and others, and has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Russell Sage Foundation, and Ford Foundation.
Thomas Ogorzalek is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Urban Studies at Northwestern University. He is co-director of the Chicago Democracy Project, a Civic Engagement Fellow, and a Faculty Associate at the Institute for Policy Research. His research is focused on the intersections of race, urban politics, and American political development.
Spencer Piston is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Boston University. He was named a Distinguished Junior Scholar by the Political Psychology Section of the American Political Science Association. His research, which examines the effects of attitudes about race and class on public opinion and political behavior, has been published in leading social science journals including The Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Behavior, Political Psychology, and Political Communication.
Laura A. Reese is Professor of Political Science and the founding Director of the Global Urban Studies Program (GUSP) at Michigan State University. She is the Editor of the Global Urban Book Series for Routledge Publications. Dr. Reese’s main research and teaching areas are in urban politics and public policy, economic development, and local governance and management in Canada and the U.S. She has written eleven books and over 100 articles and book chapters in these areas as well as public personnel administration focusing on the implementation of sexual harassment policy.
Ashley C. Rondini is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Franklin and Marshall College. Her research and teaching interests integrate qualitative analyses of social justice and social policy issues with critical, intersectional inquiry along lines of race, gender, socioeconomic class, and other dimensions of social identity. She was the 2010 recipient of the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) Sydney S. Spivack Congressional Fellowship, and a 2013 awardee of an ASA Carla B. Howery Teaching Grant. She is the editor of the Race, Gender, and Class section of the ASA’s online Teaching Research And Innovations Library In Sociology (TRAILS), and a member of the Teaching Sociology Editorial Board. Her work has been published in Sociological Forum, Sociology Compass, and Teaching Sociology.
Vincent Roscigno is Distinguished Professor of Arts and Science in Sociology at Ohio State University. His research focuses primarily on power, inequality, and discrimination in the institutional domains of work and education. He has also been investigating historically poignant moments in American Indian and U.S. History, the role of culture and politics in bolstering group control and violence, and their immediate and long-term impacts.
Abigail A. Sewell is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Emory University. Sewell received her BA summa cum laude in sociology from the University of Florida and her PhD and MA in Sociology from Indiana University, Bloomington. Specializing in advancing quantitative methods in race and racism studies, her research focuses on the political economy of structural racism and racial health disparities. Her articles have appeared in Social Science and Medicine, Social Science Research, Journal of Urban Health, and the Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. Her work has been support by the National Institutes of Health, the Ford Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Sewell is currently finishing a book-length manuscript on the health effects of the Great Recession.
Jason E. Shelton is Director of the Center for African American Studies and Associate Professor of Sociology at The University of Texas at Arlington. His research interests concern the sociology of religion, as well as the intersections of race, class, and attitudes about various political and social issues in contemporary America. His first book, Blacks and Whites in Christian America: How Racial Discrimination Shapes Religious Convictions (2012), won a major award from the Southern Conference on African American Studies and an honorable mention from the American Sociological Association’s Section on the Sociology of Religion. Dr. Shelton earned his PhD and MA degrees in Sociology at the University of Miami (FL), and BA in Sociology at Kent State University. From 2006-2008, he served as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Sociology at Rice University, where he worked on the first wave of the Portraits of American Life Study (PALS).
Evelyn M. Simien is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Connecticut, jointly appointed with Africana Studies. Her first book, Black Feminist Voices in Politics (SUNY Press, 2006), examined black feminist consciousness and its effect on political behavior using national survey data. Her second book, Gender and Lynching: The Politics of Memory (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2011), focused on African American women who suffered racial-sexual violence in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Her third book, Historic Firsts: How Symbolic Empowerment Changes U.S. Politics (Oxford University Press, 2015), considers whether candidates like Shirley Chisholm in 1972 and Jesse Jackson in 1984 as well as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in 2008 mobilize voters through emotional appeals while combating stereotypes and providing more inclusive representation.
Christi M. Smith is Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Oberlin College. She received her PhD from Indiana University and her research interests bring together higher education, political sociology, organizations, and social policy. Her book, Race and Reconciliation: The Rise and Fall of Integrated Higher Education (2016) examines the emergence of higher education as an organizational field in the late 19th century, and the attendant consequences for African Americans, women, and poor whites.
Cheryl Staats is a Senior Researcher at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University. While her current research focuses on implicit racial/ethnic bias, she has also worked extensively on a range of other projects, including alliance-building and intergroup relations. Cheryl is a graduate of the University of Dayton with a BA in Sociology and Spanish. She earned a MA in Sociology at The Ohio State University.
Logan Strother is a PhD candidate in political science at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, and Visiting Scholar at the Harry S. Truman School of Public Affairs at the University of Missouri. His research, which is focused on the intersections of public law and public policy, has been published in the Journal of Law and Courts and the Policy Studies Journal.
Angela Stuesse is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is broadly interested in social inequality, and her work focuses on neoliberal globalization, migration, race, labor, human rights, and methodologies of activist research. Her award-winning book, Scratching Out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South (2016), explores how new Latino migration into Mississippi’s poultry industry has impacted communities and prospects for worker organizing. Stuesse earned her PhD from the University of Texas-Austin and has held academic appointments at UCLA, The Ohio State University, and the University of South Florida. www.AngelaStuese.com
Marieke van Londen holds a PhD in Sociology (Radboud University). She was a visiting scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago, as part of a larger research project on ethnic relations funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). She currently works as a researcher at the Research Department of the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration, where she studies issues in the field of legal (fiscal) psychology and sociology.
Chandra D. L. Waring holds a joint position as an Assistant Professor of Sociology, Criminology, and Anthropology and Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. She earned her PhD in Sociology from the University of Connecticut, where she was a Multicultural Fellow, in 2013. Her research focuses on the growing black/white biracial population. She served as a guest editor and author for a Special Issue of the Sociological Imagination entitled “Navigating the Racial Minefield: Narratives of Professors, Graduate Students and an Undergraduate Student of Color.” Her other publications include black/white biracial Americans’ dating patterns and romantic experiences in Race, Gender & Class and a co-authored auto-ethnography about teaching critical content at a predominantly white institution in Feminist Teacher. She is also a consultant who focuses on the important relationship between diversity, emotional intelligence, and mindfulness.
George Wilson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Miami. His research interests focus on the institutional production of racial/ethnic inequality in the American workplace and the social structural determinants of race/ethnic-specific views about the American stratification system.
Kevin H. Wozniak is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He received his PhD in justice, law, and society and American politics from American University. He studies the politics of punishment and criminal justice with a particular focus on public opinion about criminal justice. He is a former Congressional Fellow of the American Political Science Association and W. E. B. DuBois Fellow of the National Institute of Justice. He is also the co-author of Thugs and Thieves: The Differential Etiology of Violence, published by Oxford University Press.
