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.
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…
Faculty Affiliate Nancy MacLean’s research has been featured in a blog post by Richard Murphy on the Finding the Future Blog. He writes, “Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains is one of the most powerful books of our time. It is not a conspiracy theory but a history of how the American right turned James Buchanan’s…
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…
Faculty Affiliate Carliss Chatman, Professor at SMU Dedman School of Law, was quoted in a story by Marketplace examining how companies are quietly rebranding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. The article explores how some corporations are scaling back or reframing public-facing DEI language amid political scrutiny. And, that the broader landscape is more nuanced…
February 20, 2026 — A new first-of-its-kind study of nearly 3,000 adults in New York City finds significant inequities in wealth and health outcomes across the 11 most common racial and ethnic groups, showing that Black and Latino New Yorkers have less wealth and unfairly worse health outcomes compared to others. Conducted in June 2024 by…
Faculty Affiliate Omer Ali is an Assistant Professor of economics at the University of Pittsburgh, and previous postdoctoral fellow a the Cook Center. Ali is the lead researcher on a new article published in Regional Science and Urban Economics this month examining the relationship between race and home values in Durham, North Carolina. The study…