The Samuel DuBois Cook Center is a scholarly collaborative that studies the causes and consequences of inequality and develops remedies for these disparities and their adverse effects.
Cook Center Faculty Affiliate Fenaba R. Addo, Ph.D., recently coauthored a review article in the Annual Review of Sociology that explores the racialized dynamics of debt and wealth in the United States. The paper synthesizes various categories of research that examine the sources of racial disparities in wealth and debt, and it explores how these disparities reflect…
Pop quiz: You’re a junior economics professor who’s about to go up for tenure. How should you pick your potential reviewers so that your odds of success are highest? How do (or even how can) you balance the big three of teaching, research, and service to the profession? And, most importantly, where do you find…
Faculty Affiliate John Purakal was recently featured in Duke Today as one of the three recipients of the 2025 Algernon Sydney Sullivan Award. Purakal is an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Duke University School of Medicine. His research interests include social drivers of health, racial & ethnic disparities of emergency care, and cardiovascular disease….
Faculty Affiliate Keisha Bentley-Edwards, Associate Professor of Medicine at Duke University, will deliver the Richard Payne Lecture in Faith, Justice, and Health Care this Friday. The event is hosted by the Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative at Duke Divinity School. Her lecture, titled Black Women’s Religion and Their Health: When Individual and Institutional Factors Intersect, represents…
On November 10th, Faculty Affiliate Nancy MacLean, William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy Emerita at Duke University, visited the Yale Center on Public Theology & Public Policy to speak on a panel, “Theology and Resistance: What History Teaches Us”. She joined Bishop William Barber II and legal scholar John Witt to discuss…
Founding Director William A. Darity Jr.’s work on reparations was highlighted in Capital B story about the possibility of mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani to successfully purse reparations in New York City. Dr. Darity’s says that closing the racial wealth gap is the best measure for reparations. He estimates that New York would have to pay…
