Rate My Professor Karida Brown

Karida L. Brown is a Professor of Sociology at Emory University. A historical and cultural sociologist, her research centers on ontologies of race, racialization, and racism, exploring how racial difference is invented, rationalized, and imposed under racial capitalism and how racialized peoples remake themselves amid systemic racism. Her work spans migration, education, collective memory, social theory, W.E.B. Du Bois, community archives, and public arts. Brown holds a PhD in Sociology from Brown University (2016; winner of the 2017 American Sociological Association Best Dissertation Award), an MA in Sociology from Brown University (2012), an MPA in Government from the University of Pennsylvania (2009), and a BBA in Risk Management from Temple University (2004). Her academic career includes prior roles as Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at UCLA (2021-present; tenured and promoted to full professor), Assistant Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at UCLA (2016-2021), Visiting Assistant Research Professor of Sociology at UNC Chapel Hill (2017-2018), Visiting Diane Nash Descendants of Emancipation Chair and Director of the John Lewis Center for Social Justice at Fisk University (2021-2022). She also served as Director of Racial Equity & Action for the Los Angeles Lakers (2020-2022) and held underwriting positions at Zurich North America and AIG earlier in her career.

Brown is the author of Gone Home: Race and Roots through Appalachia (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), which earned the 2019 American Sociological Association Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award, Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book, and Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award, among others; The Sociology of W.E.B. Du Bois: Racialized Modernity and the Global Color Line (NYU Press, 2020; co-authored with José Itzigsohn); The New Brownies Book: A Love Letter to Black Families (Chronicle Books, 2023; co-authored with Charly Palmer), recipient of the 2024 NAACP Image Award and Boston Globe-Horn Book Award; and The Battle for the Black Mind (Legacy Lit, 2025). She co-edited The Oxford Handbook of W.E.B. Du Bois (Oxford University Press, 2024) and contributed to Race in America, 3rd edition (W.W. Norton, 2025). Key articles include “Sociology and the Theory of Double Consciousness: W.E.B. Du Bois’ Phenomenology of Racialized Subjectivity” (Du Bois Review, 2015; co-authored with José Itzigsohn) and “The Hidden Injuries of School Desegregation” (American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 2016). She has guest-edited Southern Cultures, served on advisory boards such as the Obama Presidency Oral History Project, and delivered public lectures, contributing significantly to social science scholarship on race and Black life.