Christa Buschendorf is Professor and Chair of American Literature and Culture at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. She specializes in transatlantic intellectual history, the reception of antiquity in the United States, and American poetry. In her current research she is exploring the approach of figurational and relational sociology to African American Literature. Her recent publications include a study on the reception of Schopenhauer in the U.S., The High Priest of Pessimism (in German, 2008), and Civilizing and Decivilizing Processes: Figurational Approaches to American Culture, co-edited with Astrid Franke and Johannes Voelz (2011).
Yunxiang Gao is Associate Professor of East Asian History at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. She holds a PhD from the University of Iowa, an MA from Peking University, and a BA from Inner Mongolia Normal University, all in history. Her research has primarily focused on the intersections of gender, sport, media, and celebrity. Gao is now working on transpacific cultural workers in the World War II period. She has published articles in Gender & History, Modern Chinese Languages and Literature, Sport in Society, and the Journal of American East-West Relations. Several of the articles have been translated into Chinese. Her book, Sporting Gender: Women Athletes and Celebrity-Making during China's National Crisis, 1931–1945 appears in 2013 from the University of British Columbia Press. She is now writing a book on Liu Liangmo, the father of mass singing in China in the twentieth century, intermediary between China and Black America in World War II, and a close associate of Paul Robeson.
Arline T. Geronimus is Professor in the School of Public Health and Research Professor and Associate Director of the Population Studies Center, Institute for Social Research, at the University of Michigan. Dr. Geronimus originated the “weathering hypothesis” as a framework for theorizing U.S. racial health inequality. She has authored numerous articles in social science, public health, and medical journals, including “To Denigrate, Ignore, or Disrupt: Racial Inequality in Health and the Impact of Policy-induced Breakdown of African American Communities” (with Phil Thompson in the Du Bois Review, 2004). Dr. Geronimus' most recent chapters include, “The Mutability of Women's Health with Age: The Sometimes Rapid, and Often Enduring, Health Consequences of Injustice” (with Rachel Snow, 2013); and “Jedi Public Health: Leveraging Contingencies of Social Identity to Eliminate Racial Health Inequality” (2013).
Brenda L. Henry-Sanchez is a Senior Program Officer in Research and Evaluation at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), the largest foundation in the United States exclusively focused on improving health and health care for all Americans. Dr. Henry-Sanchez oversees evaluations of programs and initiatives with the potential for widespread replication and national impact and funds research that expands our understanding of how best to improve the health and well-being of America's most vulnerable populations. Prior to joining RWJF, Dr. Henry-Sanchez served as Program Director at the Center for Applied Research and Technical Assistance, where she lead work to improve programs that served youth of color. Dr. Henry-Sanchez received both her PhD in health behavior and health education and her MPH from the University of Michigan.
Marcus Anthony Hunter is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Yale University, where he also holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of African American Studies. Hunter received his BA from Columbia University and his MA and PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University. Hunter's research and teaching interests include urban politics and change, racial and ethnic relations, sexuality, historical sociology, ethnography, and inequality. In February 2013, Oxford University Press will publish Hunter's book, Black Citymakers: How The Philadelphia Negro Changed Urban America.
Jane Jones is an Assistant Professor in the Anthropology and Sociology Department at Ursinus College in Collegeville, PA. She received her AB in Sociology from the University of Chicago and her PhD in Sociology from New York University. Her research focuses on issues of race and social capital, with an emphasis on philanthropy and social networks. Jones is currently at work on a book on how understandings of race structure the world of elite philanthropy.
Melanie Jones Gast is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at DePaul University in Chicago, IL. She studies the links between racial/ethnic and class positions and processes that relate to social mobility, particularly among racial/ethnic minority youth and families. She focuses on perceptions of identity, access, and opportunity in organizational, educational, and community contexts. Her research spans issues related to race, ethnicity, class, education, culture, and urban communities.
Tiffany D. Joseph is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Scholar at Harvard University (2011–2013) and Assistant Professor of Sociology at SUNY Stony Brook. Her research examines comparative frameworks of race in the Americas, how immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean adapt to the U.S. racial system, the healthcare access of immigrants, and the experiences of faculty of color and women in academia. Dr. Joseph has published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Race and Social Problems, and Gender and Education. She is currently writing a book on how U.S. migration changes the racial conceptions of Brazilian return migrants in Governador Valadares, Brazil.
Amanda E. Lewis is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Emory University. Her research focuses on how race shapes educational opportunities and on how our ideas about race get negotiated in everyday life. She is the author of Race in the Schoolyard: Negotiating the Color-line in Classrooms and Communities (2003). She is also the co-editor (with Maria Krysan) of The Changing Terrain of Race and Ethnicity (2004), and co-author (with Mark Chesler and Jim Crowfoot) of Challenging Racism in Higher Education: Promoting Justice (2005). Her research has appeared in a number of academic venues including Sociological Theory, American Educational Research Journal, American Behavioral Scientist, Race and Society, and Anthropology and Education Quarterly. She is currently at work on a new book (with John Diamond), titled Despite the Best Intentions: Why Racial Inequality Persists in Good Schools (Oxford, forthcoming).
C. Shawn McGuffey is Associate Professor of Sociology and African & African Diaspora Studies at Boson College. His work primarily highlights how race, gender, and social class both constrain and create the choices survivors pursue in the aftermath of trauma. His two current projects focus on sexual trauma. One examines how gender, sexuality, and race shape parental responses to child sexual abuse; and the other investigates the social psychology of Black rape survivors in the United States, Ghana, and South Africa. McGuffey is the recipient of two American Sociological Association awards: the 2006 Sally Hacker Award from the sex and gender section and the 2009 “Best Research Article Award” from the section on sexualities. The Ford Foundation and a Research Incentive Grant have supported his research.
Annie Menzel is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Washington, in the subfield of political theory. Her dissertation focuses on the historical and contemporary politics, and implications for political thought and policy, of the United States' racial disparities in infant mortality. Her research interests include the embodied and intergenerational impacts of racism; race and feminist political theory; midwifery and birth politics; race, citizenship, and maternal embodiment; and the biopolitics of reproduction both within and across national borders.
Dina Okamoto is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on understanding how group boundaries and identities shift and change, which has broader implications for immigrant incorporation as well as intergroup conflict and cooperation. Dina's current projects investigate the civic and political incorporation of immigrants in the United States, intergroup relations between native-born and immigrant groups in new and re-emerging gateways, and the role of community-based organizations in the lives of immigrant youth. She has been a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York and a visiting fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford. Dina is currently finishing a book on panethnic group formation and identity among Asian Americans.
Chinyere Osuji is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Africana Studies. She received her PhD in Sociology in 2011 from UCLA, where she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Trainee. A former Fulbright Scholar, she has received awards for her work from the American Sociological Association and the Population Association of America. Currently, she is writing a book comparing the experiences of Black-White couples in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Los Angeles, California. In fall 2013, she will be Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University-Camden.
Sabrina Pendergrass is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and the Carter G. Woodson Institute of African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. She specializes in race, inequality, internal migration, culture, and regionalism. She has current or forthcoming publications on these topics in Poetics and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. She is working on a book-length manuscript about the African American reverse migration to the U.S. South. Work from this project has received awards from the Society for the Study of Social Problems and the Association of Black Sociologists.
Frank L. Samson is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Miami. He attended UCLA to earn a Bachelor of Science in Cybernetics with a dual concentration in behavioral and life sciences, followed by a Master of Theological Studies at Harvard University and an MA and PhD in Sociology at Stanford University. He has been a fellow of the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Public Policy Institute of California, and Stanford University's Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. His research interests include race and ethnic relations, inequality, social psychology, and political sociology.
Cornel West is Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice at Union Theological Seminary, New York City, and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He graduated from Harvard and obtained his MA and PhD in Philosophy at Princeton. He has taught at Yale, Harvard, and the University of Paris. He is best known for his classic The American Evasion of Philosophy (1989), as well as Race Matters (1993), and Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism (2004).
