Hilary B. Bergsieker is a PhD candidate in the Department of Psychology at Princeton University. She grew up in Los Angeles and earned her BA from Stanford University with honors in psychology and German studies. Her current research interests span multiple aspects of intergroup relations, including prejudice, stereotyping, group identity, and the behavioral dynamics of interracial interactions. Some of her past and ongoing research projects examine German national identity and ethnocentrism, multiracial identity expression, emotion construal and choice across cultures, changes in reported stereotypes over time, and impression management in interracial contexts. Bergsieker's work has received support from a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship and a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education.
Galen V. Bodenhausen is Lawyer Taylor Professor of Psychology and Marketing at Northwestern University, where he also serves as codirector of the Center on the Science of Diversity. He earned his PhD in social psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research addresses the cognitive functions of social attitudes and stereotypes, particularly their roles in influencing attention, perception, memory, judgment, and behavior. A frequent focus of his recent research is on the relatively automatic and implicit aspects of prejudice and stereotyping. Bodenhausen is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. He currently serves as editor in chief of Personality and Social Psychology Review.
Traci Burch is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University and Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. Her current research examines changing racial boundaries in the United States; Supreme Court activity of interest groups; grassroots organizing in Atlanta, Charlotte, and Chicago; and the prevalence of organized interests and their political activities. Her dissertation, “Punishment and Participation: How Criminal Convictions Threaten American Democracy,” won the American Political Science Association's William Anderson Award for the best dissertation in the field of state and local politics, federalism, or intergovernmental relations (2008), the American Political Science Association Urban Politics Section's Best Dissertation in Urban Politics Award (2008), and Harvard University's Robert Noxon Toppan Prize for the best dissertation in political science (2007).
Jennifer Crocker is Claude M. Steele Collegiate Professor of Psychology and Research Professor at the Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. She earned her PhD from Harvard University in 1979. She is president-elect of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), president of the International Society for Self and Identity (ISSI), and was president of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology. Her research on the consequences of egosystem and ecosystem perspectives for relationships, achievement, and mental health is funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). She received an NIMH Independent Scientist Award, a Lifetime Career Award from ISSI, and the Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize from SPSSI.
Richard P. Eibach is Assistant Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario. His research interests include social judgment, self-perception, intergroup conflict, collective memory, ideologies, and social justice. Eibach studies biases in people's judgments of social change, including factors that lead people to mistake changes within themselves for changes in the external world and biases that sustain intergroup conflict on the topic of progress toward equality. His articles have appeared in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Psychological Science, and Sex Roles.
Susan T. Fiske is Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology at Princeton University (PhD, Harvard University; honorary doctorates, Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium; Universiteit Leiden, Netherlands). She investigates cognitive stereotypes and emotional prejudices at cultural, interpersonal, and neural levels, currently with support from the Russell Sage Foundation. The Supreme Court cited her gender-bias testimony, and she testified for former President Clinton's Race Initiative. Editor of Annual Review of Psychology and Handbook of Social Psychology, she wrote Social Beings: A Core Motives Approach to Social Psychology (2003) and Social Cognition (2007). She won the American Psychological Association's Early Career Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues' Allport Intergroup Relations Award, and the Association for Psychological Science's William James Award. She was elected Association for Psychological Science president, Foundation for the Advancement of Behavioral and Brain Sciences president, and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Richard Thompson Ford is George E. Osborne Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. An expert on civil rights and antidiscrimination law, Richard Thompson Ford has distinguished himself as an insightful voice and compelling writer on questions of race and multiculturalism. His scholarship combines social criticism and legal analysis, and he writes for both popular readers and academic and legal specialists. His work has focused on the social and legal conflicts surrounding claims of discrimination, on the causes and effects of racial segregation, and on the use of territorial boundaries as instruments of social regulation. Methodologically, his work is at the intersection of critical theory and the law. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 1994, he was a Reginald Lewis fellow at Harvard Law School, a litigation associate with Morrison & Foerster, and a housing policy consultant for the City of Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was also the commissioner of the Housing Authority of San Francisco. He has written for the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, and Slate, where he is a regular contributor to the Convictions legal blog. His latest book is The Race Card: How Bluffing about Bias Makes Race Relations Worse (2008).
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is editor in chief of the Oxford African American Studies Center, the first comprehensive scholarly online resource in the field of African American Studies and Africana Studies, and of the Root, an online news magazine dedicated to coverage of African American news, culture, and genealogy. In 2008, Oxford University Press published the African American National Biography. Coedited with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, it is an eight-volume set containing more than 4000 biographical entries on both well-known and obscure African Americans. He is most recently the author of In Search of Our Roots (2009), a meditation on genetics, genealogy, and race, and a collection of expanded profiles featured on his PBS documentary series, “African American Lives.” His other recent books are America Behind the Color Line (2004), African American Lives, coedited with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (2004), and The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin, edited with Hollis Robbins (2006). Professor Gates's most recent documentary is “Looking for Lincoln,” broadcast on PBS in February, and his edited collection of President Lincoln's writing and speeches, Lincoln on Race and Slavery, was published by Princeton University Press in February as well.
Samuel D. Gosling is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. He earned his PhD at the University of California at Berkeley, where his dissertation focused on personality in spotted hyenas. In addition to his animal work, he also does research on Internet-based methods of data collection and on how individuals leave deliberate and inadvertent clues about themselves in everyday contexts, such as bedrooms, offices, Web pages, Facebook profiles, and lists of music preferences. His human research is summarized in his book Snoop: What Your Stuff Says about You (2008). Gosling has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, and he is the recipient of the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution.
Shayne B. Hughes is Chief Operating Officer and Executive Facilitator of Learning as Leadership (LaL). LaL teaches leaders to understand how their personal behaviors and ego dynamics limit their ability to effectively lead others. For more than eighteen years, he and his team have consulted with such organizations as Shell Oil, FAA, NASA, NAVAIR, NIST, Sandia National Laboratories, and the U.S. Department of Social Services. Hughes' lectures include “The Ultimate Obstacle to Effective Leadership” at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club and his published works include “The Ultimate Obstacle to Effective Leadership,” a presentation published by Pegasus Communications; “From Performance to Presence: The Organic Nature of Learning and Change” in Reflections; and “Constructive Dialogue: Communicating Effectively about Tough Issues” at the Council on Foundations' 56th Annual Conference.
Matthew O. Hunt is Associate Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University. His primary research interests involve intersections of race/ethnicity, social psychology, and inequality in contemporary societies. His work has appeared in the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Social Psychology Quarterly, Social Science Quarterly, and other publications. Ongoing projects include studies of U.S. racial attitudes, stratification beliefs, and patterns of interregional migration in the United States.
John T. Jost is Professor of Social Psychology at New York University, where he has taught since 2003. He has also served on the faculties of the University of California at Santa Barbara and Stanford University. His research focuses on stereotyping, prejudice, social justice, political ideology, and system justification theory. He has published over seventy scientific articles and book chapters and has coedited four books, including Social and Psychological Bases of Ideology and System Justification (2009). He has received many professional awards and honors, including the Erik Erikson Award for Early Career Research Achievement in Political Psychology, the International Society for Self & Identity Early Career Award, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Theoretical Innovation Prize, the Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize (three times), and the Morton Deutsch Award for Distinguished Scholarly and Practical Contributions to Social Justice. His research has been covered widely in the media, including ABC News Nightline, Newsweek, Scientific American, Psychology Today, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, and numerous national and international newspapers.
Jane Junn is Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University. Her primary interests are political participation and elections in the United States, political behavior and attitudes among American minorities and immigrants, theories of democracy, survey research, and social science methodology. Her coauthored book Education and Democratic Citizenship in America won the 1997 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Book Award from the American Political Science Association. She is also coauthor of Civic Education (1998) and coeditor of New Race Politics in America (2008), along with articles and chapters on political participation. She is currently at work on a book on race and political participation in the United States, with emphasis on the dynamics of immigration and racial diversity.
Desmond S. King holds the Andrew W. Mellon Chair of American Government at the University of Oxford, where he is also a fellow of Nuffield College. His research is on race and American political development, welfare and labor market policy, and democratization; and his books include Separate and Unequal: African Americans and the US Federal Government, 2nd ed. (2007). Between 2005 and 2009, he held a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship for a project on the American state. He is completing a book on the structure of American racial politics, coauthored with Rogers Smith.
Taeku Lee is Professor of Political Science and Law at the University of California at Berkeley. His primary research interests are in racial and ethnic politics, public opinion and survey research methods, social movements, and political behavior. His book Mobilizing Public Opinion (2002) received the American Political Science Association's J. David Greenstone Award and the Southern Political Science Association's V. O. Key Award. He recently coedited Transforming Politics, Transforming America (2006) and coauthored Race, Immigration, and Non(Partisanship) in America. Lee is currently coediting the Oxford Handbook of Racial and Ethnic Politics in the United States, coediting Voice with Teeth: Public Opinion and Accountability for the World Bank, and embarking on a new book project, tentatively titled Race, Identity, Power, and Method.
Christopher S. Parker is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington. He is the author of Fighting for Democracy: Black Veterans and the Struggle against White Supremacy in the Postwar South (2009). He has also published in the Journal of Politics and International Security. A veteran of the armed forces, Parker earned his PhD from the University of Chicago.
Destiny Peery is a PhD/JD candidate in the Department of Psychology and School of Law at Northwestern University. She earned her BA in psychology from the University of Minnesota and her MA in social psychology from Northwestern University. Her primary line of research addresses how people perceive and categorize ambiguous targets (e.g., racially ambiguous or multiracial people) and the implications of initial categorization processes on subsequent reactions to the targets. She is broadly interested in social cognition and racial stereotyping and prejudice.
Valerie Purdie-Vaughns is Assistant Professor of Social Psychology at Columbia University in New York. Her research interests include stereotype threat and strategies to close racial and gender achievement gaps in educational, legal, and corporate institutions. Other research interests include science of diversity, stigma and self-perceptions, intersectionality, and stereotypicality and perceptions of criminality. The broad theme underlying her research is the threats to social identity people face in settings where their group has been historically marginalized. Her articles have appeared in Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science, and Sex Roles. Purdie-Vaughns was recently awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to study the effects of the election of the first African American president, Barack Obama, on the academic motivation and performance of children.
S. Karthick Ramakrishnan is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Riverside. His research interests include political participation, civic voluntarism, and the politics of race, ethnicity, and immigration in the United States. He is principal investigator on a multisite research project on immigrant civic engagement, funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, and a project on civic engagement in new growth regions by the James Irvine Foundation. His articles have appeared in International Migration Review, Urban Affairs Review, and Social Science Quarterly. He recently coedited a volume titled Civic Hopes and Political Realities: Immigrants, Community Organizations, and Political Engagement (2008). He is also the author of Democracy in Immigrant America (2005) and the coeditor of Transforming Politics, Transforming America (2006).
Ann Marie Russell is a PhD candidate in the Department of Psychology at Princeton University, where she investigates various social psychological reactions to stigmatized social classes. Her primary research concerns the role of perceived threat to symbolic values in people's extreme and ambivalent reactions to economically disadvantaged individuals. Another research program investigates differences in welfare policy preferences as a function of the perceived deservingness of the beneficiary group. A final line of research explores how social-class memberships shape psychological orientations, particularly in the domains of goals and decision making. Her research is supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the Russell Sage Foundation, and a Society for Personality and Social Psychology Diversity Fund Award.
Mark Q. Sawyer is Associate Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at UCLA and Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Politics. He is the author of Racial Politics in Post-Revolutionary Cuba (2006), which was awarded the Du Bois Award for best book by the National Conference of Black Political Scientists, and the Ralph Bunche Award by the American Political Science Association.
Rogers M. Smith is a Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and Chair of the Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism. He has written extensively on race, citizenship, and American political development, including The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America (1999, with Philip A. Klinkner) and Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (1997). He is completing a book on the structure of American racial politics, coauthored with Desmond King.
Christopher Towler is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington, with a focus in American politics, race and ethnicity, and methodology. He earned his BA in political science and ethnic studies from the University of Colorado. His research interests currently include the examination of racial identity among African American youth, as well as the role of political attitudes and behavior in terms of political efficacy and political trust.
Tessa V. West is Assistant Professor of Psychology at New York University. She earned her PhD from the University of Connecticut in 2008, where she focused on advanced methodological and analytical techniques for the study of dyadic- and group-level processes. West studies interpersonal perception during complex interactions between two or more individuals. Her work focuses primarily on interactions between individuals who are of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. West has applied longitudinal methods to examining how interracial interactions between two strangers unfold over time.
Lyle Williams earned his AB in social psychology from Princeton University in 2006. He is a cofounder of the Princeton University Pan-African Graduation Committee. His interests include interracial relationships, prejudice, and stereotypes. During the 2005–2006 academic year, he submitted an empirical thesis that explored the intraracial stereotypes of Black people in America.
David C. Wilson is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations, holding joint appointments in the Department of Psychology, and the Black American Studies Program, at the University of Delaware. He specializes in political psychology, public opinion, racial attitudes, organizational behavior, and survey research methodology. His research has been published in Public Opinion Quarterly, the Journal of Applied Psychology, and Personnel Psychology. Prior to his appointment at the University of Delaware, Wilson was a senior statistical research consultant at the Gallup Organization in Washington, DC.
William Julius Wilson is Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University. Past president of the American Sociological Association, Wilson has received forty-one honorary degrees, including honorary doctorates from Princeton, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, Dartmouth, and the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. A MacArthur Prize fellow from 1987 to 1992, Wilson has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Education, the Institute of Medicine, and the British Academy. He is a recipient of the 1998 National Medal of Science, the highest scientific honor in the United States, and was awarded the Talcott Parsons Prize in the Social Sciences by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003. His publications include three award-winning books, The Declining Significance of Race (1978), The Truly Disadvantaged (1987), and When Work Disappears (1996). His most recent publications include There Goes the Neighborhood (coauthored with Richard Taub, 2006), and More Than Just Race (2009).
Howard Winant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is also affiliated with the Black Studies and Chicana/o Studies Departments. He founded and directs the UCSB Center for New Racial Studies. Winant's work focuses on the historical and contemporary importance of race in shaping economic, political, and cultural life, both in the United States and globally. He is the author of The New Politics of Race: Globalism, Difference, Justice (2004), The World Is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy since World War II (2001), Racial Conditions: Politics, Theory, Comparisons (1994), Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (coauthored with Michael Omi, 1986 and 1994), and Stalemate: Political Economic Origins of Supply-Side Policy (1988).
Janelle Wong is Associate Professor of Political Science and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include race, ethnicity, and politics; political participation; political mobilization; and public opinion research. She is author of Democracy's Promise: Immigrants and American Civic Institutions (2006). She has published articles on race, ethnicity, and politics in Political Behavior, American Politics Review, Social Science Quarterly, P.S.: Political Science and Politics, and the American Journal of Sociology. As part of the Pilot National Asian American Political Study (PNAAPS) research team, she coauthored The Politics of Asian Americans: Diversity and Community (2004). Her current research is on immigration, religion, and conservative politics in the United States.
