Department of Sociology

Marcus Anthony Hunter received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University in 2011. His research and teaching pursuits are driven by an interest in examining, analyzing, and uncovering how and why particular inequities exist and in what ways place, race, and the agency of urban blacks facilitate and/or mitigate such inequities. His current book project, Black Citymakers: How the Philadelphia Negro Changed Urban America, explores how the agency and heterogeneity of urban black residents influences patterns of urban and neighborhood change over the course of the 20th Century, focusing in particular on the socio-political history of Philadelphia's 7th Ward—the black neighborhood immortalized in W.E.B. DuBois's The Philadelphia Negro (1899). His research has benefited from grants from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. In addition, Hunter’s research and commentary on urban black life and inequality has been featured in the journals City & Community, Sexuality Research & Social Policy and the New York Times.