Christopher Bonastia is Associate Professor of Sociology at the City University of New York, Lehman College. He received his PhD from New York University, and was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy from 2001 to 2003 at the University of California, Berkeley. His primary scholarly interests are in race and social policy. Bonastia is the author of Knocking on the Door: The Federal Government's Attempt to Desegregate the Suburbs (Princeton University Press, 2006). Currently he is completing a book project, funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, on the school closings in Prince Edward County.
Matthew Desmond is a Ford Foundation Fellow and PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His most recent book, Racial Domination, Racial Progress: The Sociology of Race in America (McGraw-Hill, 2009), coauthored with Mustafa Emirbayer, is a comprehensive overview of race in America. His first book, On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters (University of Chicago Press, 2007), an ethnographic study of how high-risk organizations socialize workers to put their lives on the line, was a finalist for the Society for the Study of Social Problems' C. Wright Mills Award and won the American Sociological Association's Max Weber Award for Distinguished Scholarship. His current research combines ethnographic and survey-based methods to examine eviction and the reproduction of urban poverty.
Mustafa Emirbayer is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Since earning his PhD from Harvard University in 1989, he has edited Émile Durkheim: Sociologist of Modernity and has authored several prominent articles that have appeared in American Journal of Sociology, Theory and Society, and other leading academic journals. In 2009, the American Sociological Association awarded him the Lewis A. Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda Setting. He is currently writing The Theory of Racial Domination, coauthored with Matthew Desmond: a theoretical work that offers a new framework for understanding the structures and dynamics of race and racism.
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 “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. 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.
Moon-Kie Jung teaches Sociology and Asian American studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Martin Kilson is Frank G. Thomson Professor of Government Emeritus at Harvard University. He started teaching in 1962 as the first African-American faculty member in Harvard College and gained tenure in the Department of Government in 1969. He retired from teaching in Spring Term 1999, after which he was Frank G. Thomson Research Professor until 2003. The courses he taught included “Politics and Society in African States,” “Politics of African Populism,” “Authoritarian States in Africa,” “Politics and Society among African-Americans,” and “Ethnic Groups in American Political Culture.” His publications include Political Changes in a West African State (Harvard University Press, 1966), Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience (Harcourt Brace & Jovanovich, 1970), New States in the Modern World (Harvard University Press, 1975), The African Diaspora: Interpretive Essays (Harvard University Press, 1976), The Making of Black Intellectuals: Studies on the African-American Intelligentsia (Forthcoming, University of Missouri Press). He is completing a study of the Obama campaign entitled Barack Obama's Road to the White House.
Krysia N. Mossakowski is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Miami. She specializes in medical sociology, mental health, social psychology, life course, and race/ethnicity. Her research has examined the adverse mental health consequences of stressors, such as racial/ethnic discrimination and long-term unemployment among young adults in the United States. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Social Psychology Quarterly, Journal of Urban Health, Social Science and Medicine, Research on Aging, and the American Journal of Public Health.
Thomas Pettigrew is Research Professor of Social Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A Harvard PhD, he also taught at Harvard (1957–1980) and Amsterdam (1986–1991). He was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study and has conducted intergroup research throughout the world. He was president of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues and has received the Society's Lewin Award, twice its Allport Intergroup Research Award, the American Sociological Association's Spivack Award, the Society for Experimental Social Psychology's Distinguished Scientist Award, the Lifetime Achievement Awards of the International Academy for Intercultural Research and the Society for Peace, Conflict and Violence, as well as the University of California's Panunzio Distinguished Emeriti Award.
Claude M. Steele is the Provost of Columbia University as well as a Professor of Psychology. His research focuses on the psychological experience of the individual and, particularly, on the experience of threats to the self and the consequences of those threats. He is recognized as a leader in the field of social psychology and for his commitment to the systematic application of social science to problems of major societal significance. He received his PhD in psychology in 1971 from Ohio State University and has received many honorary degrees, including from the University of Chicago, Yale University, and Princeton University. As a faculty member at Stanford University, he held appointments as the Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences, as Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and as the Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He is a member of the Board of the Social Science Research Council and of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Board of Directors. He has published articles in numerous scholarly journals, and a book entitled Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us is forthcoming.
Mary Liz Stewart and Paul Stewart are independent scholars and co-founders of the Underground Railroad History Project of the Capital Region, Inc., a public history organization dedicated to the research, celebration and preservation of Underground Railroad history with an emphasis on African American abolitionists and freedom seekers. They have been appointed Scholars-in-Residence at Russell Sage College (2009). Together they have been awarded a Sense of Place Award (2006) from the City of Albany, the Black History Month Service and Leadership Award from the NYS Department of Health Affirmative Action Advisory Committee (2006), and the UGR Free Press Prize for Preservation (2008) for their restoration work on the historic Stephen and Harriet Myers Residence. They have organized numerous workshops, walking tours, and conferences on Underground Railroad history.
Binod Sundararajan is Assistant Professor of Business Communication at the School of Business Administration, Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He holds a PhD in Communication and Rhetoric and specializes in research in organizational, professional, and computer-mediated communication and social network analysis. His most recent publication is “The Impact of Communication Patterns, Network Positions and Social Dynamics Factors on Learning among students in a CSCL Environment” (Electronic Journal of e-Learning [EJEL] Volume 7, Issue 1 [71:84], May 2009). His research focuses on business and professional communication practices, adoption and diffusion of mediated technologies, use of CMC in such diverse areas as entrepreneurship, justice, teaching, collaborative work and learning, and historical data analysis.
George Wilson is Associate 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 beliefs about the causes of racial/ethnic inequality in the American stratification system. He presently serves as a Deputy Editor of the American Sociological Review.
Nicholas Maurice Young is a sociologist and independent researcher, currently residing in Cleveland, Ohio. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago. His work focuses on illuminating the social structural aspects of social protests and the entrepreneurial process. He is a former Fellow with the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University, and a former Affiliated Researcher with the same group. He is a recipient of a Kauffman Foundation grant to explore the entrepreneurial aspects of social protests among African Americans during slavery. He is currently writing a book that is based on data that maps the social structure of the Underground Railroad across North America.
