Josephine A. V. Allen is Professor Emerita of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University and Professor of Social Work at Binghamton University. She is co-editor of Letters to President Obama (2009).
Timothy Bates is Distinguished Professor of Economics at Wayne State University. Prior to this appointment, he was Professor of Policy Analysis at the New School for Social Research. His short-term appointments include American Statistical Association/National Science Foundation/Census Bureau Fellow, Woodrow Wilson Center Fellow, W. E. B. Du Bois visiting scholar at UCLA, and Floyd McKissick visiting scholar at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has served as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division. Professor Bates is the author of five books on urban economic development issues, the most recent of which is Race, Self-Employment, and Upward Mobility: An Illusive American Dream (1997), published by Johns Hopkins University Press. In May 2010, he was inducted into the Minority Business Hall of Fame.
Clayborne Carson is Professor of History at Stanford University and founding director of that institution's Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. Until the end of 2009, he also served as Martin Luther King, Jr. Distinguished Professor at Morehouse College in Atlanta and as Executive Director of that institution's Morehouse King Collection (http://www.morehouse.edu/kingcollection/index.html). Dr. Carson has also been a visiting professor or visiting fellow at American University, the University of California, Berkeley, Emory University, Harvard University, and the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. His publications include In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (1981), the definitive history of the most dynamic and innovative civil rights organization. He also co-authored African American Lives: The Struggle for Freedom (2005). As senior editor of King's papers, he has edited or co-edited numerous books, including six volumes of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1992–2007) and The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1997). Dr. Carson has also contributed to many documentaries, including the multi-part series Eyes on the Prize and Have You Heard from Johannesburg.
Donald R. Deskins, Jr. is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Urban Geography at the University of Michigan. He is author, co-author and editor of numerous articles, books and reviews on minority collegiate recruitment and development and of sociological research on urbanization and decline. The recipient of several awards for teaching, scholarly accomplishment, and alumni esteem at The University of Michigan, Dr. Deskins is also a Korean War veteran and a previous first-round draftee of professional football.
Niki Dickerson vonLockette is Associate Professor of Labor Studies at Rutgers University. Her work examines the impact of residential segregation on unemployment and wages for Blacks and Latinos in metropolitan areas and the effects of workplace occupational segregation on worker attitudes. Her current projects include an analysis of the 2009 recession's impact on Black employment in comparison with the 1980s recession and the effect of racial/ethnic occupational crowding in metropolitan labor markets on wages for Black and Latino men. The National Academy of Science awarded her a HUD post-doctoral fellowship to study the impact of residential segregation on the race gap in unemployment. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Michigan. She has served as consultant for the U.S. Departments of Labor and Commerce and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Michigan and her work can be found at http://smlr.rutgers.edu/NikiDickerson/index.htm.
Reynolds Farley is a Research Scientist at the University of Michigan's Population Studies Center and the Otis Dudley Duncan Professor Emeritus of Sociology. His research concerns demographic trends in the United States, especially the analysis of racial differences. He also maintains a website devoted to the history and future of Detroit at http://www.Detroit1701.org.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. An influential scholar in the field of African American Studies, he is the author of twelve books and has hosted and produced ten documentaries, including the acclaimed PBS series “Faces of America” and “African American Lives.” Professor Gates is co-editor, with Professor Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, of the African American National Biography (an eight-volume biographical dictionary published by Oxford University Press in 2008), and his recent work has been instrumental in popularizing African American genealogical research and DNA testing. His book, In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past, won an NAACP Image Award in 2010. He is the recipient of 50 honorary degrees and many awards, including the MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” and the National Humanities Medal, and was named to Time magazine's “25 Most Influential Americans” list in 1997, and to Ebony magazine's “100 Most Influential Black Americans” list in 2005 and its “Power 150” list in 2009.
Abdoulaye Gueye is Associate Professor of sociology at the University of Ottawa. He was a resident fellow at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University during the 2008–2009 academic year. He is the author of Les intellectuels africains en France (Paris, L'Harmattan, 2001). He has co-edited Figures croisées d'intellectuels (Paris, Karthala, 2007); Figures et expériences diasporiques (a special issue of the Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales, 2006); and Africa Confronts Development (a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Development Studies). His next book provisionally titled Aux Négres d'hommes la patrie non reconnaissante is scheduled to appear in late 2010.
Thomas C. Holt is the James Westfall Thompson Distinguished Service Professor of American and African American History at the University of Chicago. A John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur fellow and former president of the American Historical Association, he has a longstanding interest in framing the African American experience comparatively. He is the author of Black over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction (1977); The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (1992); The Problem of Race in the Twenty-first Century (2000); and Children of Fire: A History of African Americans (2010).
John L. Jackson, Jr. is the Richard Perry University Professor of Communication and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America (2001); Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (2005); and Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness (2008). Jackson is currently finishing a book on global Black Hebrewism and producing a series of ethnographic films on contemporary urban life in the United States.
Jacqueline Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at Adelphi University in Garden City, New York. Her research addresses institutions, such as residential stratification and mass incarceration, as mechanisms of racialization and economic stratification. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from North Carolina State University.
Trica Danielle Keaton is an Associate Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is a 2009–2010 Fellow of Columbia University's Institute for Scholars at Reid Hall in Paris, France (2009–2010), a long-term Associate of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, she has been a visiting scholar at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France. She is the author of Muslim Girls and the Other France: Race, Identity Politics, and Social Exclusion (Foreword by Manthia Diawara, 2006), co-editor with Darlene Clark Hine and Stephen Small of Black Europe and the African Diaspora (2009) containing her chapter “‘Black (American) Paris’ and the French Outer-Cities: The Race Question and Questioning Solidarity,” and co-editor with Tracy Sharpley-Whiting and Tyler Stovall of the forthcoming anthology: Black France-France Noire: Blackness, Diaspora, and National Identity Politics (Foreword by Christiane Taubira). She is currently working on her next monograph, (Anti) Blackness in French Society.
Douglas S. Massey is the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He is the Past-President of the American Sociological Association and the Population Association of America and current President of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. His publications include American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Harvard University Press 1993, coauthored with Nancy Denton) and Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System (Russell Sage Foundation 2007). He is currently at work on a book examining the social ecology of racial and class inequality.
Shayla C. Nunnally is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Connecticut. She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in political science from Duke University. She received her B.A. in political science in 1998 from North Carolina Central University. During 2004–2005, she was an Erskine A. Peters Dissertation Fellow at the University of Notre Dame. Her research focuses on American politics, African-American politics, and public opinion. Her book, In Whom Do We Trust? Black Americans, (Dis)Trust, and the Vestiges of Race, is forthcoming with New York University Press.
Shaun Ossei-Owusu is a doctoral student in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his undergraduate education at Northwestern University in Communication Studies and African American Studies and an interdisciplinary Masters degree in Africana Studies and Urban Studies. His research interests include inequality, law and society, crime, culture, and urban history. His research explores how race, class and gender influence bureaucratic discretion in the criminal justice system. He is currently an Exchange Scholar at the University of Chicago, a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow and a Doctoral Fellow at the American Bar Foundation. Shaun is originally from the South Bronx, New York and splits his time between Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Nell Irvin Painter, the Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, Princeton University, is the author of seven books and editor of two Penguin Classic editions. W. W. Norton published her most recent book, The History of White People (2010), as well as Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919 (2nd ed., 2009) and Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol (1996). A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Antiquarian Society, she will receive a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2011.
LiErin Probasco is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University. Her dissertation examines how participants in short-term international humanitarian aid travel navigate status and power when encountering social difference (including nationality, race, and wealth). Her research interests include culture and inequality, religion, race and ethnicity, and community development.
Sherman C. Puckett holds a Ph.D. in urban and regional planning from the University of Michigan. He was a mayoral appointee in the data processing department of the Coleman A. Young administration in the City of Detroit and recently retired from Wayne County government as manager of technology, geographic information systems, and development of maintenance management systems. He has co-authored and co-edited several books, articles and atlases on presidential elections, the African American electorate, and the election of Barack Obama.
Barbara D. Savage is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of History in the Department of History of the University of Pennsylvania where she has taught since 1995. Savage received her doctorate in history from Yale in 1995, and also holds a law degree from Georgetown University and an undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia. Her most recent book is Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion (Harvard University Press, 2008). She also is the author of Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938–1948 (University of North Carolina Press, 1999), which won the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library Award for the best book in American history in the period 1916–1966. In addition, she is co-editor of Women and Religion in the African Diaspora (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). At Penn, among other commitments, she is Faculty Associate Director of the Center for Africana Studies. She has received external fellowship awards from the Smithsonian Institution, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University, the Princeton University Center for the Study of Religion, and the Scholars-in-Residence Program at the Schomburg Center on Black Culture of the New York Public Library.
Julie Saville is Associate Professor in African American and Caribbean History at the University of Chicago. She is author of The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina (1994), co-editor and contributor to Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation in the United States: The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South (1990), and most recently a contributor to Deborah Gray White (Ed.), Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower (2008). She is completing Shards of Liberty, a study of political cultures of slavery and antislavery in regions of the Caribbean in the aftermath of the Haitian revolution.
Robert T. Starks is Associate Professor of Political Science and Inner City Studies at The Jacob Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies (CCICS) at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. He is the founder and Director of The Harold Washington Institute for Research and Policy Studies (HWRIPS) at CCICS where his research interests focus on issues of Black political empowerment, elections, and voting. He has authored and co-authored many articles on Chicago politics and the elections of Harold Washington and Barack Obama. He is currently writing a book on the political life of Chicago's first Black Mayor, Harold Washington.
Jessica M. Vasquez is Assistant Professor in Sociology at the University of Kansas. Her first book, Mexican Americans across Generations: Immigrant Families, Racial Realities, is forthcoming with New York University Press. Her research fields include Race/Ethnicity, Mexican Americans/Latinos, Family, Identity, International Migration, Assimilation, and Culture. She has published articles in Ethnic and Racial Studies and Sociological Perspectives.
Hanes Walton, Jr. is Professor of Political Science and Research Professor in the Institute of Social Research at the University of Michigan. He is the co-editor of Letters to President Obama (2009) and co-author of Presidential Elections, 1789–2008: County, State and National Mapping of Election Data (2010).
