In The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois makes a prescient declaration: “The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color-line.”
As the United States continues to struggle with “the problem of the color-line” in the 21st century, Stanford University’s School of Humanities and Sciences has sought to recruit faculty whose research helps advance our understanding of how race has shaped U.S. history, politics, culture and national identity.
In the last three years, the school has hired multiple faculty across varied departments whose work addresses these critical issues. Featured here are eight recent Stanford faculty hires in art and art history, English, political science, psychology and sociology. Click on each photo to read what the faculty member says about his or her work.
“Today’s society confronts problems of racial division that are in some ways more complex than those that characterized previous eras of Jim Crow and legally enforced segregation,” said Debra Satz, the Vernon R. and Lysbeth Warren Anderson Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences and the Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society. “The exciting research and writing of these faculty contributes to deepening our knowledge and understanding of the obstacles to and opportunities for achieving racial equality in the U.S.”
Several of these new hires will contribute to the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. “Understanding the persistence of racial inequality and how race operates in nearly every sector of society requires multiple intellectual perspectives,” said Jennifer DeVere Brody, director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and professor of theater and performance studies. “We are thrilled to have a new interdisciplinary cohort of colleagues who can interrogate different U.S. racial formations not only in sociology and psychology, but also art and technology.”
In addition to the hires profiled in this story, Matthew Clair and Asad L. Asad, both in sociology, will join H&S in fall 2019. Asad studies how U.S. immigration policies and enforcement create social inequality and Clair researches race and the legal system. And there are more ongoing searches in history, linguistics and philosophy which will contribute to this effort.
Along with faculty at Stanford already contributing to the study of race in the U.S., this constellation of scholars will broaden the ways in which we understand how race pervades our lives and work toward solutions for the ongoing challenge Du Bois named.
Steven O. Roberts
Steven O. Roberts
Assistant professor of psychology
“How and why do we divide the world into racial categories and how do we form biases based on those divisions? Given that race concepts play a critical role in reinforcing racial hierarchy, it is important to rigorously test and highlight the ways in which race continues to shape human psychology and to identify ways to move us toward a more tolerable society.
“In my research, I try to advance the psychological understanding of race and racism. I tackle this effort from a variety of perspectives: (1) how racial essentialism – the belief that categories have an underlying essence – predicts racial prejudice and what people even think race is; (2) the cognitive processes that predict social stereotyping and perceptions of group biases; and (3) how American myths, like those involving white purity and divinity, help legitimize social hierarchies.
“In my classes, I hope that students walk away familiar with the psychological theories and experiments that further our understanding of race and racism and with the awareness of their own beliefs and biases as well as the tools and motivation to combat them. As a teacher, there has been nothing more rewarding than helping students further their understanding of society while also helping them further their understanding of themselves.”
Photo by L.A. Cicero
Marci Kwon
Marci Kwon
Assistant professor of art and art history
“My research considers the relationship between hierarchies of taste, such as divisions between fine art and popular culture, and social hierarchies governed by race, ethnicity, class and gender. Relatedly, I am interested in issues of cross-cultural exchange, particularly between Asia and the Americas. I am currently working on a book-length project about the intersections of art, anthropology and the origins of cultural pluralism.
“As a woman of color, I often felt I was neither ‘American’ enough nor ‘Asian’ enough. Studying art helped me see that I was not alone in grappling with these feelings and gave me new ways of thinking about these questions.
“As a scholar of American art, I believe it is crucial to explore the depth and diversity of American culture. By its very definition, American art includes work by immigrants and people of color, but these narratives have too often been shoehorned into their own subfields. A truly inclusive and more historically accurate history of American art should include a broad range of perspectives and works.
“My research and teaching are inextricably linked. I want my students to see the numerous ways that people of color have transformed their experiences of the world, and their intellectual and aesthetic concerns, into works of art. From this, I hope my students learn that there are infinite ways to be in the world.”
Photo by L.A. Cicero
Rose Salseda
Rose Salseda
Acting assistant professor of art and art history
“My scholarship is centered on the art history of people of color in the United States, with particular interests in how Black and Brown artists critically engage with historical narratives as a means of recovering and giving voice to the experiences of marginalized communities. For my book project on the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, I specifically look at two generations of artists who challenge polarizing racial narratives and media representations of the unrest as a means to hold open space for overlooked cross-racial, immigrant, and intergenerational experiences.
“My lived experience as a person of color who grew up in South Los Angeles during the 1980s and 1990s directly influenced my research and scholarship. I understood, on an intimate level, the ways in which discrimination, inequity, and policing disproportionately affected Black, Brown, and immigrant peoples during this time.
“Because the discipline of art history is rooted in Eurocentrism and has historically privileged the cultural production of straight white men, I also find it extremely important to capture counter-narratives and recover the histories of people of color and other marginalized communities. Writing such art histories is critical because it allows us to record the empowering cultural contributions of those who have been excluded, not only from the major texts of the discipline, but also from broader historical narratives.
“One of my goals as an educator is to ensure that these cultural contributions are remembered, respected, and valued. My greatest hope is for students to be inspired to be the next generation of art patrons, museum professionals, archivists, administrators, educators, and scholars who will champion and further build infrastructures to support marginalized artists and to conserve their vital cultural legacies.”
Photo by Sam Romero
Chang-rae Lee
Chang-rae Lee
The Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor, Department of English
“If there’s an ‘essential’ inquiry across my work, it concerns how a given powerful context – historical, cultural, ethnic, even environmental – can form and deform individual consciousness and how these novel and unexpected formations can, in turn, dynamically reshape the larger realm.
“My inspiration is undoubtedly my upbringing in an immigrant family, with English as our second language. Like many newcomers our lives were predicated upon being observant of unfamiliar customs, practices, attitudes, including assumptions and perceptions of who we were and our place in our new society. And I saw firsthand how my parents re-fashioned themselves to make our life work, a necessary reinvention that occurred both consciously and unconsciously.
“I hope my work is relevant to the consideration of much of what’s challenging in this increasingly multicultural, migratory and globalized world, which seems to be caught at a moment of profound misunderstanding and conflict among its peoples.
“Although I teach creative writing seminars, my primary hope is that my students become deeply engaged and attentive in their reading practice. We focus on close examination of all the texts we encounter, including the peer work presented in workshops, often working at the sentence level in teasing out the various components of narrative such as characterization, voice and structuring to see how the writer creates emotion and meaning.”
Photo by Michelle Lee
Hakeem Jefferson
Hakeem Jefferson
Assistant professor of political science
“My work considers the complexities of identity and the role it plays in affecting individuals’ political choices. In an ongoing research project, I examine how the politics of respectability – concern about the behavior and comportment of in-group members – affects black Americans’ attitudes toward punitive social policies that target and affect members of their own racial group. In a different collaborative project with colleagues at other universities, I describe and explain the racial divide in Americans’ responses to officer-involved shootings.
“I grew up in a lower income community that was overwhelmingly black. When I arrived at graduate school, however, I was disappointed that so much of the ‘mainstream’ work on race and politics focused on the attitudes and predilections of white Americans. Thanks to great mentors and advisers, I was exposed to excellent research by pioneering scholars of race and politics. This work, coupled with my own experiences as a black man in America, inspires the questions I ask and my commitment to being a publicly engaged scholar.
“I think of the classroom as a place of great discovery. I hope that students who take my courses leave with an understanding of how central race is to every aspect of American politics and life. I feel a special obligation to have students understand how people different from them come to think about and engage the political world. I hope they will leave with a greater capacity to understand the range of considerations that affect our political choices.”
Photo by Jackie Sargent
Forrest Stuart
Forrest Stuart
Associate professor of sociology
“I am a sociologist and ethnographer committed to immersive fieldwork in urban poor communities. My research reveals the ‘hidden’ causes and consequences of poverty that aren’t typically measured by social scientists, discussed by the media, or debated by policymakers. How, for example, does recurring and abusive treatment by the criminal justice system ‘spill over’ and damage relationships with neighbors, family and peers? How do seemingly mundane behaviors – like a walk to school, an upload to Facebook or the start of a new friendship – open impoverished youth to deadly violence? And which policies succeed and fail to actually address these issues?
“My desire to rethink the causes and consequences of urban poverty developed decades ago as a kid growing up in San Bernardino, California. There, I experienced firsthand the subtle but nontrivial ways that economic and physical insecurity structure every aspect of daily life. As I grew older, I witnessed just how inadequately ‘experts’ discussed these topics, designing policies and programs without ever spending much time in the streets, homes and public spaces of urban America. We cannot begin to meaningfully address the issues of inequality unless we have research capable of producing empirically backed, evidence-based interventions.
“Throughout my teaching, I embrace the philosophy that the best way to learn social science is to get out into the world and do it. Walk through neighborhoods, talk to people, be curious, ask questions. My courses push students to combine the abstract theorizing of the ivory tower with the on-ground, real-world knowledge held by community members. We have to treat these groups as valuable experts and co-producers of knowledge, without whom our research endeavors will ultimately fail.”
Photo courtesy Forrest Stuart
Patrick Phillips
Patrick Phillips
Professor of English
“All my life I’ve been fascinated by the past, and as a poet I’ve written a lot about the mysterious world of childhood. More recently, in a nonfiction book called Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America, I told another kind of family story, about the waves of white terrorism that in 1912 transformed the place where I was raised in the north Georgia mountains.
“I was in second grade when I first heard that whites in my hometown once ‘ran out’ all of their black neighbors, but I assumed it was just a legend. Decades later, I discovered the reality behind the tale and used archival sources to piece together what really happened to the 1,100 African American residents of Forsyth County, Georgia.
“I am always mindful that Nelson Mandela made truth-telling an obligatory precondition for reconciliation. I wrote Blood at the Root because for more than a century the perpetrators of this massive communal theft simply got away with it. Many of their descendants grew wealthy from the sale of land that was stolen from black farmers in 1912. In the face of so much denial and willful ignorance, I wanted to force my own community to confront the overwhelming evidence that today’s white prosperity was built on a foundation of racial injustice and horrific racial violence.
“We are living at a time when digital archives are making the internet into a kind of Hubble Telescope, allowing us to look at the past with a new clarity. Doing that type of research has also transformed my teaching and emboldened me to trespass across the borders that separate creative writing workshops from disciplines like history, sociology and critical race studies.”
Photo by Cardoni
Jackelyn Hwang
Jackelyn Hwang
Assistant professor of sociology
“Cities and their neighborhoods are transforming rapidly. What are the consequences of these changes? How does a legacy of residential segregation and racial and ethnic inequality influence how these changes unfold? How can we measure these changes? My research focuses primarily on the U.S. and on gentrification’s role in this transformation. I explore how the racial and ethnic composition of neighborhoods shapes the uneven development of neighborhoods and how gentrification redistributes residents by race and class in ways that reproduce neighborhood inequality. I also work on developing measures of urban neighborhood change by incorporating its physical and visible features using machine learning, computer vision and street-level imagery.
“Growing up in a suburb adjacent to Camden, New Jersey, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, I had always been struck by the stark segregation of places. As an undergraduate at Stanford, I learned about urban decline and segregation and its role in producing and reifying racial and ethnic inequality in America during the latter half of the 20th century. But whenever I returned home, I observed the transformation of some neighborhoods and the extreme poverty that others faced in Philadelphia. I wanted to better understand why segregation and poverty persist so strongly despite these changes.
“I hope my students come away with a nuanced understanding of gentrification and its role in the broader context of urban inequality and racial stratification – and that they make conscious choices and actions as they move beyond Stanford.”
Photo by Steve Gladfelter
Steven O. Roberts
Steven O. Roberts
Assistant professor of psychology
“How and why do we divide the world into racial categories and how do we form biases based on those divisions? Given that race concepts play a critical role in reinforcing racial hierarchy, it is important to rigorously test and highlight the ways in which race continues to shape human psychology and to identify ways to move us toward a more tolerable society.
“In my research, I try to advance the psychological understanding of race and racism. I tackle this effort from a variety of perspectives: (1) how racial essentialism – the belief that categories have an underlying essence – predicts racial prejudice and what people even think race is; (2) the cognitive processes that predict social stereotyping and perceptions of group biases; and (3) how American myths, like those involving white purity and divinity, help legitimize social hierarchies.
“In my classes, I hope that students walk away familiar with the psychological theories and experiments that further our understanding of race and racism and with the awareness of their own beliefs and biases as well as the tools and motivation to combat them. As a teacher, there has been nothing more rewarding than helping students further their understanding of society while also helping them further their understanding of themselves.”
Photo by L.A. Cicero
Marci Kwon
Marci Kwon
Assistant professor of art and art history
“My research considers the relationship between hierarchies of taste, such as divisions between fine art and popular culture, and social hierarchies governed by race, ethnicity, class and gender. Relatedly, I am interested in issues of cross-cultural exchange, particularly between Asia and the Americas. I am currently working on a book-length project about the intersections of art, anthropology and the origins of cultural pluralism.
“As a woman of color, I often felt I was neither ‘American’ enough nor ‘Asian’ enough. Studying art helped me see that I was not alone in grappling with these feelings and gave me new ways of thinking about these questions.
“As a scholar of American art, I believe it is crucial to explore the depth and diversity of American culture. By its very definition, American art includes work by immigrants and people of color, but these narratives have too often been shoehorned into their own subfields. A truly inclusive and more historically accurate history of American art should include a broad range of perspectives and works.
“My research and teaching are inextricably linked. I want my students to see the numerous ways that people of color have transformed their experiences of the world, and their intellectual and aesthetic concerns, into works of art. From this, I hope my students learn that there are infinite ways to be in the world.”
Photo by L.A. Cicero
Rose Salseda
Rose Salseda
Acting assistant professor of art and art history
“My scholarship is centered on the art history of people of color in the United States, with particular interests in how Black and Brown artists critically engage with historical narratives as a means of recovering and giving voice to the experiences of marginalized communities. For my book project on the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, I specifically look at two generations of artists who challenge polarizing racial narratives and media representations of the unrest as a means to hold open space for overlooked cross-racial, immigrant, and intergenerational experiences.
“My lived experience as a person of color who grew up in South Los Angeles during the 1980s and 1990s directly influenced my research and scholarship. I understood, on an intimate level, the ways in which discrimination, inequity, and policing disproportionately affected Black, Brown, and immigrant peoples during this time.
“Because the discipline of art history is rooted in Eurocentrism and has historically privileged the cultural production of straight white men, I also find it extremely important to capture counter-narratives and recover the histories of people of color and other marginalized communities. Writing such art histories is critical because it allows us to record the empowering cultural contributions of those who have been excluded, not only from the major texts of the discipline, but also from broader historical narratives.
“One of my goals as an educator is to ensure that these cultural contributions are remembered, respected, and valued. My greatest hope is for students to be inspired to be the next generation of art patrons, museum professionals, archivists, administrators, educators, and scholars who will champion and further build infrastructures to support marginalized artists and to conserve their vital cultural legacies.”
Photo by Sam Romero
Chang-rae Lee
Chang-rae Lee
The Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor, Department of English
“If there’s an ‘essential’ inquiry across my work, it concerns how a given powerful context – historical, cultural, ethnic, even environmental – can form and deform individual consciousness and how these novel and unexpected formations can, in turn, dynamically reshape the larger realm.
“My inspiration is undoubtedly my upbringing in an immigrant family, with English as our second language. Like many newcomers our lives were predicated upon being observant of unfamiliar customs, practices, attitudes, including assumptions and perceptions of who we were and our place in our new society. And I saw firsthand how my parents re-fashioned themselves to make our life work, a necessary reinvention that occurred both consciously and unconsciously.
“I hope my work is relevant to the consideration of much of what’s challenging in this increasingly multicultural, migratory and globalized world, which seems to be caught at a moment of profound misunderstanding and conflict among its peoples.
“Although I teach creative writing seminars, my primary hope is that my students become deeply engaged and attentive in their reading practice. We focus on close examination of all the texts we encounter, including the peer work presented in workshops, often working at the sentence level in teasing out the various components of narrative such as characterization, voice and structuring to see how the writer creates emotion and meaning.”
Photo by Michelle Lee
Hakeem Jefferson
Hakeem Jefferson
Assistant professor of political science
“My work considers the complexities of identity and the role it plays in affecting individuals’ political choices. In an ongoing research project, I examine how the politics of respectability – concern about the behavior and comportment of in-group members – affects black Americans’ attitudes toward punitive social policies that target and affect members of their own racial group. In a different collaborative project with colleagues at other universities, I describe and explain the racial divide in Americans’ responses to officer-involved shootings.
“I grew up in a lower income community that was overwhelmingly black. When I arrived at graduate school, however, I was disappointed that so much of the ‘mainstream’ work on race and politics focused on the attitudes and predilections of white Americans. Thanks to great mentors and advisers, I was exposed to excellent research by pioneering scholars of race and politics. This work, coupled with my own experiences as a black man in America, inspires the questions I ask and my commitment to being a publicly engaged scholar.
“I think of the classroom as a place of great discovery. I hope that students who take my courses leave with an understanding of how central race is to every aspect of American politics and life. I feel a special obligation to have students understand how people different from them come to think about and engage the political world. I hope they will leave with a greater capacity to understand the range of considerations that affect our political choices.”
Photo by Jackie Sargent
Forrest Stuart
Forrest Stuart
Associate professor of sociology
“I am a sociologist and ethnographer committed to immersive fieldwork in urban poor communities. My research reveals the ‘hidden’ causes and consequences of poverty that aren’t typically measured by social scientists, discussed by the media, or debated by policymakers. How, for example, does recurring and abusive treatment by the criminal justice system ‘spill over’ and damage relationships with neighbors, family and peers? How do seemingly mundane behaviors – like a walk to school, an upload to Facebook or the start of a new friendship – open impoverished youth to deadly violence? And which policies succeed and fail to actually address these issues?
“My desire to rethink the causes and consequences of urban poverty developed decades ago as a kid growing up in San Bernardino, California. There, I experienced firsthand the subtle but nontrivial ways that economic and physical insecurity structure every aspect of daily life. As I grew older, I witnessed just how inadequately ‘experts’ discussed these topics, designing policies and programs without ever spending much time in the streets, homes and public spaces of urban America. We cannot begin to meaningfully address the issues of inequality unless we have research capable of producing empirically backed, evidence-based interventions.
“Throughout my teaching, I embrace the philosophy that the best way to learn social science is to get out into the world and do it. Walk through neighborhoods, talk to people, be curious, ask questions. My courses push students to combine the abstract theorizing of the ivory tower with the on-ground, real-world knowledge held by community members. We have to treat these groups as valuable experts and co-producers of knowledge, without whom our research endeavors will ultimately fail.”
Photo courtesy Forrest Stuart
Patrick Phillips
Patrick Phillips
Professor of English
“All my life I’ve been fascinated by the past, and as a poet I’ve written a lot about the mysterious world of childhood. More recently, in a nonfiction book called Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America, I told another kind of family story, about the waves of white terrorism that in 1912 transformed the place where I was raised in the north Georgia mountains.
“I was in second grade when I first heard that whites in my hometown once ‘ran out’ all of their black neighbors, but I assumed it was just a legend. Decades later, I discovered the reality behind the tale and used archival sources to piece together what really happened to the 1,100 African American residents of Forsyth County, Georgia.
“I am always mindful that Nelson Mandela made truth-telling an obligatory precondition for reconciliation. I wrote Blood at the Root because for more than a century the perpetrators of this massive communal theft simply got away with it. Many of their descendants grew wealthy from the sale of land that was stolen from black farmers in 1912. In the face of so much denial and willful ignorance, I wanted to force my own community to confront the overwhelming evidence that today’s white prosperity was built on a foundation of racial injustice and horrific racial violence.
“We are living at a time when digital archives are making the internet into a kind of Hubble Telescope, allowing us to look at the past with a new clarity. Doing that type of research has also transformed my teaching and emboldened me to trespass across the borders that separate creative writing workshops from disciplines like history, sociology and critical race studies.”
Photo by Cardoni
Jackelyn Hwang
Jackelyn Hwang
Assistant professor of sociology
“Cities and their neighborhoods are transforming rapidly. What are the consequences of these changes? How does a legacy of residential segregation and racial and ethnic inequality influence how these changes unfold? How can we measure these changes? My research focuses primarily on the U.S. and on gentrification’s role in this transformation. I explore how the racial and ethnic composition of neighborhoods shapes the uneven development of neighborhoods and how gentrification redistributes residents by race and class in ways that reproduce neighborhood inequality. I also work on developing measures of urban neighborhood change by incorporating its physical and visible features using machine learning, computer vision and street-level imagery.
“Growing up in a suburb adjacent to Camden, New Jersey, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, I had always been struck by the stark segregation of places. As an undergraduate at Stanford, I learned about urban decline and segregation and its role in producing and reifying racial and ethnic inequality in America during the latter half of the 20th century. But whenever I returned home, I observed the transformation of some neighborhoods and the extreme poverty that others faced in Philadelphia. I wanted to better understand why segregation and poverty persist so strongly despite these changes.
“I hope my students come away with a nuanced understanding of gentrification and its role in the broader context of urban inequality and racial stratification – and that they make conscious choices and actions as they move beyond Stanford.”
Photo by Steve Gladfelter