Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies & the Economy

Luther Adams is an Associate Professor at the University of Washington – Tacoma. He graduated with B.A. in history from the University of Louisville (1994), and a Ph.D. from history at the University of Pennsylvania (2002). Since 2002, he has taught courses on United States history; urbanization and African American culture and history at UWT. He has published in a variety of forums including the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Ohio Valley History Journal, the Journal of Social History and the Journal of Urban History. His book Way Up North in Louisville: African American Migration in the Urban South, 1930-1970 was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2010.

His current research project, Black and Blue: End Police Brutality argues police brutality, like lynching upheld the white supremacist order while denying black people justice, safety and freedom. Police brutality was and remains at the root of Black protest politics throughout the twentieth century. He is also writing a collection of essays WE FUNK!: From the Bullet to the Ballot, From P-Funk to G-Funk that use funk to explore black economic, political and cultural life in the late twentieth century.

Dr. Karen J. Gibson joined the Nohad A. Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University in 1998. She has an M.S. in Public Management and Policy from Carnegie Mellon University and a Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from the University of California at Berkeley. Her scholarship seeks to answer questions about the political economy of racial economic inequality in the urban setting using various disciplinary lenses. She finds the historical perspective to be most intriguing and illuminating. Her publications have appeared in Cities, Feminist Economics, Transforming Anthropology, the Journal of Planning Education and Research, and Oregon Historical Quarterly. In Portland, research topics include urban redevelopment and housing policies, neighborhood change in the city’s historic African American community, the Albina District (1940-present), and police-community relations. She teaches courses related to urban poverty, housing, and community development.

Currently, senior faculty at the Center for Creative Leadership® (CCL) Ancella is a skilled leadership development professional who has worked with thousands of managers and executives over the last 20 years. For 12 years, Ancella worked at the Center for Creative Leadership where she held a number of leadership roles including global director of open enrollment programs.  Ancella left CCL for several years to join The Executive Leadership Council® (ELC) where she served as the Executive Director of the Institute for Leadership Development and Research. Prior to working in the leadership development field, Ancella was an assistant professorship in the School of Journalism at West Virginia University. She also spent a decade as a newspaper journalist and was a Capitol Hill reporter for Gannett News Service. She is the co-author of Leading in Black and White and the HBR article “Dear White Boss.”

Alexandra K. Murphy is an Assistant Professor in Sociology and in the Ford School of Public Policy (by courtesy) and a Faculty Affiliate of the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan. She received her PhD in Sociology and Social Policy from Princeton University in 2012 and was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Poverty Center, University of Michigan from 2012-2014. Her research uses ethnographic methods to examine how poverty and inequality are experienced, structured, and reproduced across and within multiple domains of social life including neighborhoods, social networks, and the state. One line of research investigates the new suburban poverty. Murphy's work in this area has focused on variations in social service responses to rising poverty across diverse suburbs; urban and suburban comparisons in social service capacity; and the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological issues suburban poverty raises for a sociological understanding of geography and inequality. Murphy is currently working on her book, When the Sidewalks End: Poverty in an American Suburb (under contract with Oxford University Press), an ethnographic study of the social organization of poverty in one suburb. Another line of research examines the causes and consequences of transportation insecurity. Murphy is co-editor, with Mitchell Duneier and Philip Kasinitz, of The Urban Ethnography Reader (Oxford University Press 2014)

Dr. Slate’s research and teaching focus on the history of social movements in the United States and India. His first book, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Harvard University Press, 2012), argues that South Asians and African Americans learned from each other in ways that advanced their struggles for freedom. He is the editor of Black Power Beyond Borders(Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), a volume that tracks the global dimensions of the Black Power movement. His most recent book is The Prism of Race: W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson and the Colored World of Cedric Dover (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). The Prism of Race examines a crucial moment in the history of race through the lens of a self-described “Eurasian half-caste,” born in Calcutta in 1904, and his relationships with leading African American artists and intellectuals.

Dr. Slate is currently at work on three books: a study of race in Los Angeles after 1965; a biography of Mahatma Gandhi focused on his diet; and a history of connections between India and the United States from the 18th century to the present. He is the founder and director of the Bajaj Rural Development Lab, the Social Change Semester, and SocialChange101.org, and is a regular contributor to the Arts Greenhouse, a hip hop education program that promotes the artistic and educational development of Pittsburgh teenagers.