Race is a categorization of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into groups generally viewed as distinct within a given society. The term came into common usage during the 16th century, when it was used to refer to groups of various kinds, including those characterized by close kinship relations. By the 17th century, the term began to refer to physical (phenotypical) traits, and then later to national affiliations. Modern science regards race as a social construct, an identity which is assigned based on rules made by society. While partly based on physical similarities within groups, race does not have an inherent physical or biological meaning. The concept of race is foundational to racism, the belief that humans can be divided based on the superiority of one race over another.
Discrimination based on skin tone, also known as colorism or shadeism, is a form of prejudice and discrimination in which people of certain ethnic groups, or people who are perceived as belonging to a different-skinned racial group, are treated differently based on their different skin tone.
William Julius Wilson is an American sociologist, a professor at Harvard University, and an author of works on urban sociology, race, and class issues. Laureate of the National Medal of Science, he served as the 80th President of the American Sociological Association, was a member of numerous national boards and commissions. He identified the importance of neighborhood effects and demonstrated how limited employment opportunities and weakened institutional resources exacerbated poverty within American inner-city neighborhoods.
Kelly Miller was an African American mathematician, sociologist, essayist, newspaper columnist, author, and an important figure in the intellectual life of black America for close to half a century. He was known as "the Bard of the Potomac".
Theda Skocpol is an American sociologist and political scientist, who is currently the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. She is best known as an advocate of the historical-institutional and comparative approaches, as well as her "state autonomy theory". She has written widely for both popular and academic audiences. She has been President of the American Political Science Association and the Social Science History Association.
Patricia Hill Collins is an American academic specializing in race, class, and gender. She is a distinguished university professor of sociology emerita at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also the former head of the Department of African-American Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Collins was elected president of the American Sociological Association (ASA), and served in 2009 as the 100th president of the association – the first African-American woman to hold this position.
Feeling rules are socially shared norms that influence how people want to try to feel emotions in given social relations. This concept was introduced by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in 1979. Hochschild's 1983 book, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, discusses feeling rules in greater depth, especially in the occupational worlds of flight attendants and bill collectors. Hochschild draws on the work of sociologist Erving Goffman as well as labor scholar Harry Braverman to discuss the dramaturgical demands and emotional labor entailed by jobs in the service sector, in which workers must "perform" certain roles that entail abiding by certain feeling rules. She notes that women are more likely to have such jobs than men, and that analysis of feeling rules may therefore be especially relevant to understanding the gendered dimensions of labor. This work foreshadows themes from her later analyses of women's work, both paid and unpaid, e.g. in The Commercialization of Intimate Life (2003).
France Winddance Twine is a Black and Native American sociologist, ethnographer, visual artist, and documentary filmmaker. Twine has conducted field research in Brazil, the UK, and the United States on race, racism, and anti-racism. She has published 11 books and more than 100 articles, review essays, and books on these topics.
Joe Richard Feagin is an American sociologist and social theorist who has conducted extensive research on racial and gender issues in the United States. He is currently the Ella C. McFadden Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University.
The Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts & Sciences (KSAS) is an academic division of the Johns Hopkins University, a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. The school is located on the university's Homewood campus. It is the core of Johns Hopkins, offering comprehensive undergraduate education and graduate training in the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences.
Elijah Anderson is an American sociologist. He is the Sterling Professor of Sociology and of African American Studies at Yale University, where he teaches and directs the Urban Ethnography Project. Anderson is one of the nation’s leading urban ethnographers and cultural theorists. Anderson is known most notably for his book, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (1999).
Evelyn Seiko Nakano Glenn is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to her teaching and research responsibilities, she served as founding director of the university's Center for Race and Gender (CRG), a leading U.S. academic center for the study of intersectionality among gender, race and class social groups and institutions. In June 2008, Glenn was elected president of the 15,000-member American Sociological Association. She served as president-elect during the 2008–2009 academic year, assumed her presidency at the annual ASA national convention in San Francisco in August 2009, served as president of the association during the 2009–2010 year, and continued to serve on the ASA governing council as past-president until August 2011. Her presidential address, given at the 2010 meetings in Atlanta, was entitled "Constructing Citizenship: Exclusion, Subordination, and Resistance", and was printed as the lead article in the American Sociological Review.
Mary C. Waters is an American sociologist, demographer and author. She is the John L. Loeb Professor of Sociology and the PVK Professor of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. Much of her work has focused on immigrants, the meaning of racial and ethnic identity, and how immigrants integrate into a new society. Waters chaired the 2015 National Research Council Panel on The Integration of Immigrants into American Society.
Kathryn J. Edin, is an American sociologist and a professor of sociology and public affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. She specializes in the study of people living on welfare. Two of her books are Making ends meet: how single mothers survive welfare and low-wage work, and Promises I can keep: why poor women put motherhood before marriage.
Robert C. Lieberman is an American political scientist and the former provost of the Johns Hopkins University. A scholar of American political development, Lieberman focuses primarily on race and politics and the American welfare state.
Bloomberg Distinguished Professorships were established as part of a $350 million investment by Michael Bloomberg, Hopkins class of 1964, to Johns Hopkins University in 2013. Fifty faculty members, ten from Johns Hopkins University and forty recruited from institutions worldwide, will be chosen for these endowed professorships based on their research, teaching, service, and leadership records. In December 2021, it was announced that the program would be doubled in size, with an additional fifty professors bringing the total to one hundred scholars, made possible by a new investment by Michael Bloomberg. With recruitment beginning in 2022, the majority of the new professors will be recruited to work in clusters. These faculty-developed interdisciplinary clusters will recruit Bloomberg Distinguished Professors and junior faculty to Johns Hopkins University with the aim of conducting transformational research in crucial areas.
Thomas A. LaVeist is the dean and Weatherhead Presidential Chair at the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was previously the chairman of the Department of Health Policy and Management at the George Washington University, Milken Institute School of Public Health. He focuses mainly on the development of policy and interventions to address race disparities in the health field.
Stephen Lawrence Morgan is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Education at the Johns Hopkins University School of Arts and Sciences and Johns Hopkins School of Education. A quantitative methodologist, he is known for his contributions to quantitative methods in sociology as applied to research on schools, particularly in models for educational attainment, improving the study of causal relationships, and his empirical research focusing on social inequality and education in the United States.
Jennifer Lucy Hochschild is an American political scientist. She serves as the Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government, Professor of African and African American Studies and Harvard College Professor at Harvard University. She is also a member of the faculty at Harvard's Graduate School of Education and John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Tiffany Willoughby-Herard is an American academic and author who is currently an associate professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine and President of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. Her research focuses on black political thought, black radical movements, and queer and trans sexualities.
