Angel Adams Parham

Angel Adams Parham is Associate Professor of Sociology and senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture (IASC) at the University of Virginia. Her research is in the historical and comparative-historical sociology of race. She is the author of American Routes: Racial Palimpsests and the Transformation of Race (Oxford, 2017) which examines changes in race and racialization in New Orleans under the French, Spanish and Anglo-American administrations. The book was co-winner of the Social Science History Association’s Allan Sharlin Memorial book award (2018); co-winner of the American Sociological Association’s Barrington Moore book award in comparative-historical sociology (2018); and recipient of an Honorable Mention from the Thomas & Znaniecki Best Book Award, International Migration Section, American Sociological Association (2018). She is currently at work on a book manuscript tentatively entitled "Reckoning and Reconciliation: On Race and Memory in Civic Life" which compares and contrasts the social histories of three key sites in New Orleans over a three-hundred-year period as a way of examining and publicly discussing transformations in race, gender and power. In addition to this research, she is active in public-facing teaching and scholarship where she provides training for K-12 educators who are looking to better integrate Black writers and Black history into their teaching. A book related to this work came out in 2022 entitled, The Black Intellectual Tradition:Reading Freedom in Classical Literature (Classical Academic Press) She completed her B.A. in sociology at Yale University and her M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has been a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, as well as the recipient of a Fulbright grant.