Faculty-Graduate Seminar Presenters
Tyson King-Meadows
Presenter: April 9, 2008 4:30pm
Tyson King-Meadows’ research interests include American politics, specifically Congress and electoral behavior, and African American political attitudes and behavior. He has held a number of awards, including a fellowship at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, a Senior Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Ghana, and a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. His first book, co-authored with Thomas F. Schaller, Devolution and Black State Legislators: Challenges and Choices in the Twenty-First Century (State University of New York Press, 2006) shows that a myriad of institutional constraints and state political dynamics undermine the substantive representation of black interests despite sizable levels of descriptive representation. He recently finished a second book, The Slow Death of Black Voting Rights, addressing bureaucratic politics, political information, and African American political behavior. At present, Tyson is completing a book on racial authenticity in congressional elections. He is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.
Kimberly Smith
Presenter: March 26, 2008
Paper: African American Environmental Thought (.pdf)
Professor Kimberly Smith specializes in American political and environmental thought, with an emphasis on American agrarianism and environmental justice. Her most recent book, African American Environmental Thought: Foundations (Kansas, 2007), explores the ideological roots of the environmental justice movement in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American political thought. She is also the author of Dominion of Voice: Riot, Reason and Romance in Antebellum Politics (Kansas, 1999) -- winner of the Merle Curti Award for American intellectual history from the Organization of American Historians -- and Wendell Berry and the Agrarian Tradition: A Common Grace (Kansas, 2003).
Professor Smith teaches courses in environmental politics, environmental justice, American environmental thought, political theory and constitutional law.
Cathy Cohen
Presenter: March 5, 2008
Paper: Political Alienation
Antonio Guimaraes
Presenter: Feb. 27
Paper: Frantz Fanon's reception in Brazil (.pdf)
Professor Guimaraes teaches Sociology of Contemporary Race Relations at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil (USP). He is currently a Visiting Senior Research Scholar, at the Program in Latin American Studies; a Visiting Professor, at the African American Studies; and a Visiting Fellow, at the Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies. He is a specialist in Brazilian class and racial formation, racism and anti-racism mobilization in Brazil. At present, he is completing a book on the Black Modernity and Intellectuals in Brazil with a fellowship from FAPESP (Brazil) and from PIIRS (Princeton). PhD, Wisconsin University-Madison, 1988.
John L. Jackson, Jr.
Presenter: Feb. 13 Paper: On Ethnographic Sincerity
John L. Jackson Jr. is the Richard Perry University Associate Professor of Communication and Anthropology in the Annenberg School for Communication and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America (University of Chicago Press, 2001), Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (University of Chicago Press, 2005), and Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctnees (Basic Civitas, March 2008). His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, American Anthropologist, the Dubois Review, Souls, and American Journal of Sociology. He is currently completing an ethnography on global black Hebrewism.
Imani Perry
Presenter: Dec. 5 Paper (.doc)
Imani Perry is a Professor of Law at Rutgers School of Law in Camden. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard's Program in The History of American Civilization, her J.D. from Harvard Law School and her BA in Literature and American Studies from Yale College. Perry is the author of: Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Duke University Press, 2004), and is currently working on a book on the practice of racial inequality and its remedies in the contemporary United States. An interdisciplinary scholar, who uses her research to build bridges between the humanities and social sciences, she is also the author of numerous articles, essays, and book chapters in the fields of African American Studies, law and society, and cultural studies.
Brian Lowery
Presenter: Sept. 26
Paper: Inequality Frame and Academic Engagement
Brian Lowery is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior. Professor Lowery is a social psychologist by training. He received his doctorate from UCLA in 2001 with a minor in statistical methods.
Professor Lowery’s research has two major threads. The first thread examines the operation of racial attitudes below the threshold of consciousness. The second thread focuses on how people perceive inequality. Underlying both lines of work is the assumption that individuals may exacerbate existing inequity, despite supporting the ideal of a just and fair society. This research has been published in major scholarly journals such as the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and Law and Human Behavior.
Carolyn Rouse
Ph.D., University of Southern California, 1999
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology
Presenter: Oct. 10
Paper: Uncertain Suffering (.doc)
Professor Carolyn Rouse specializes in medical anthropology, visual anthropology, resistance, critical race theory and consciousness. She has done extensive fieldwork with African American converts to Sunni Islam, as well as with children and adolescents who have long term illnesses and/or disabilities. In addition to her published works, she has produced, directed and/or edited a number of documentaries including Chicks in White Satin (1994), a film about a lesbian wedding; and Purification to Prozac: Treating Mental Illness in Bali (1998). She is currently finishing a book on the American sickle cell disease community, The Politics of Uncertain Suffering, Race and Medicine. Professor Rouse teaches in both anthropology and African American studies.
Sudhir Venkatesh
Presenter: Oct. 24
Paper: part I , part II
Sudhir Venkatesh's research is rooted in ethnographic investigation of urban neighborhoods in the United States (New York, Chicago) and Paris, France. His most recent book is Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor (Harvard University Press, 2006), an ethnographic study of illegal economies in Chicago. Off the Books received the C. Wright Mills Award (2007) and a Best Book Award from Slate.Com (2006). His first book, American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto (2000), explored the social organization, moral universe, and history of a Chicago housing development, The Robert Taylor Homes. His forthcoming book, Gang Leader for a Day, is a reported memoir (Penguin Press, 2008). He is also the
co-editor of Youth, Globalization and the Law (Stanford University Press 2006) and Director of the Youth and Globalization Collaborative Research Network at the Social Science Research Council. He is currently completing a long-term project on sex work in New York and Chicago with the economist Steven Levitt.
Other ongoing research projects include a study of immigration and settlement in the suburbs of Paris, an in-depth study of re-entry among the formerly incarcerated in New York, and a ten-year documentation of transformation of public housing in Chicago. His documentary film "Dislocation," follows families as they relocate from condemned public housing developments. The documentary aired on PBS in 2005, and more information can be found at www.dislocationfilm.com.
Venkatesh received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago. He was a Junior Fellow at the Society of Fellows, Harvard University from 1996-1999. He is currently Director of the Center for Urban Research and Policy, and Director of the Charles H. Revson Fellowship Program.
Tavia Nyong'o
Presenter: Nov. 7
Paper: A Problem Like Obama
Tavia Nyong’o is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at New York University. He has published articles in Social Text, Women and Performance, the Yale Journal of Criticism, and Radical History Review. His forthcoming book, The Amalgamation Waltz: Antebellum Genealogies of the Hybrid Future, investigates cultural performances in the first half of the nineteenth century that staged fears and anticipations of a racially hybrid nation to come.
Eric Love
Presenter: Nov. 14
Paper: A Performance of Mock Negroes: Power, Culture, and the Opening of Japan
Eric Love is Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
He received his B.A. from Brown University and his MA and Ph.D.
from Princeton University. He has presented original research at conferences at Brown, The Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historial Studies at Princeton, The Walter Chapin Simpson Center at the University of Washington, the University of Califorina at Irvine, and the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Michigan. He has made presentations at the annual convention of the American Historical Association and at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His book reviews have appeared in the American Historical Review, Diplomatic History, The Journal of Southern History, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and Civil War History.
Professor Love's first book, Race Over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism,
1865 to 1900 was published by The University of North Carolina Press in 2004. It has been called "a valuable and original study" (Diplomatic History), "[e]ngagingly written and deftly argued" (Journal of American History), "one of the most important contribution in years to our understanding of American expansion" (Walter LaFeber) and "that rare book that will fundamentally change how U.S. historians approach an important topic" (Journal of Southern History). His current projects include a U.S.
survey textbook for Houghton Mifflin as well as two original books: a cultural reinterpretation of Commodore Perry's Japan mission (1853-1854), and a second, titled Storm Inside a Box: Eli Whitney's Cotton Gin and the Fate of Nations.