Rate My Professor Sean Mitchell

Sean T. Mitchell is Chair and Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey-Newark. He earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago and his B.A. in Philosophy from Rutgers University. As a sociocultural anthropologist, Mitchell's ethnographically-based research centers on the politics of inequality, particularly in Brazil, exploring themes such as space travel, political consciousness, comparative class and race politics, U.S. empire, war and violence, anti-corruption politics, and utopia. He examines how people conceptualize and act upon inequality amid historical changes. Mitchell serves as Director of the Graduate Program in Peace and Conflict Studies, core faculty in the Graduate Program in Global Urban Studies/Urban Systems Ph.D., and affiliate faculty in the Department of African American and African Studies. He is a member of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights and the International Institute for Peace.

Mitchell's scholarly contributions include the monograph Constellations of Inequality: Space, Race, and Utopia in Brazil (University of Chicago Press, 2017), which received the 2018 Sergio Buarque de Holanda Social Science Book Prize from the Latin American Studies Association Brazil Section. He co-edited Precarious Democracy: Ethnographies of Hope, Despair, and Resistance in Brazil (Rutgers University Press, 2021) and Democracia Precária (Zouk, 2022). Other notable works include the co-edited volume Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency (University of Chicago Press, 2010) and the journal issue 'Afro-Brazilian Citizenship and the Politics of History' (African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, 2017). Select articles feature 'Mobility Interrupted: A New Framework for Understanding Anti-Left Sentiment Among Brazil’s Once-Rising Poor' (Latin American Politics and Society, 2022), 'Cruel Pessimism: The Affect of Anti-Corruption and the End of the New Brazilian Middle Class' (2021), and 'Naming Brazil’s Previously Poor: New Middle Class as an Economic, Political, and Experiential Category' (Economic Anthropology, 2018), the latter awarded the 2019 Sérgio Buarque de Holanda Social Science Article Prize. His work has influenced discussions on inequality, race, and politics in Latin America through prestigious recognitions and publications in leading journals.