Professor Amanda Lewis

Amanda E. Lewis is the Director of the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy and College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of Black Studies and Sociology at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her award-winning research focuses on how race shapes educational opportunities and on how our ideas about race get negotiated in everyday life. She is the author of several books, including Despite the Best Intentions: Why Racial Inequality Persists in Good Schools and Race in the Schoolyard: Negotiating the Color-line in Classrooms and Communities. Her research has appeared in journals such as Sociological Theory, American Educational Research Journal, Ethnic & Racial Studies, Educational Researcher, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, The Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Urban Education and The Du Bois Review.

She has received grants from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Spencer Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Field Foundation, and the American Sociological Association. She is the recipient of several prestigious awards including the Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award from the American Sociological Association, the Founders Award for Scholarship & Service from the ASA’s Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities, and an Early Career Distinguished Contribution Award from the Section on Children and Youth.

As Director of IRRPP, she has led over ten years of engaged scholarship including co-authoring over a dozen reports with community partners as part of the State of Racial Justice in Chicago project chronicling the experiences and conditions of racial/ethnic groups in the city. Dr. Lewis lectures, leads workshops, and consults regularly on issues of racial and educational equity and contemporary forms of racism.