Christi M. Smith
I graduated from Smith College with a B.A. in Sociology. After working with East African refugees in Copenhagen, Denmark, conducting labor and environmental policy analysis in Washington, D.C. and teaching in secondary schools in eastern North Carolina through Teach for America, I joined the Sociology program at IU.
I am a cultural, political, and historical sociologist, interested in issues of citizenship, race, and education. My dissertation, From Radical Reconstruction to Jim Crow: Education, Nation-Building, and the Making of a New Racial Order, examines the relationship between education, race and citizenship. Specifically, I look at mixed race education movements in the mid-nineteenth century and the mechanisms which brought about segregated schooling and African American disfranchisement. My research has been funded by the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture at the College of Charleston, the Baden-Württemberg Foundation (Germany), the Frederick B. Katz Summer Research grant at Oberlin College, the Rockefeller Archive Center, and the Social Science Diversity Initiative. I have benefited from the Wells Fellowship and the Spencer Dissertation Fellowship for Research Related to Education. I have enjoyed a range of teaching opportunities through IU, including the "Faculty Fellows" program at DePauw University, teaching courses in Historical Comparative Methods and Political Culture at the University of Mannheim in Germany and teaching Sociology of the Economy, Organization and Work at IU.
