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 Postdoctoral Associate Will Damron’s paper was used in a blog post comparing the implementation of electricity and mechanised cotton spinning as new technologies to the current implementation of AI as a new technology. Johan Fourie uses Damron’s newest paper, Gains from Factory Electrification: Evidence from North Carolina, 1905-1926, to support an argument that…
Directed by documentary filmmaker and Cook Center Faculty Affiliate Bruce Orenstein, Shame of Chicago: Shame of the Nation is a five-part documentary series that brings alive the story of how Chicago’s real estate industry designed and exported the practices and policies that racially divided America’s northern cities during the 20th century. In the 2023-2024 Chicago/Midwest…
“Caste, Class, and Race: Inequality and Reparations in the US and India,” a brand-new program from Duke Immerse designed by the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity, offers Duke undergraduates an opportunity to spend the spring 2025 semester exploring group-based, systemic inequality with a focus on India and the United States, two of the…
Cook Center core faculty, Nancy MacLean, published an op-ed in the News & Observer titled “Duke leadership is letting down higher ed in a moment it should be fighting back.” In the piece, MacLean warns that American higher education is facing “the gravest menace to its mission in our history,” citing the Trump administration’s reported…
The Historic Durham Armory, the hopping location downtown that once featured acts from Duke Ellington to Ella Fitzgerald and was the inspiration for Ernie Barnes’ The Sugar Shack, hosted another lively event this week: A celebration of the 10th cohort of Young Scholars from the Hank and Billye Suber Aaron Young Scholars Summer Research Institute. …
Sandra Santillan first encountered the Hank and Billye Suber Aaron Young Scholars Summer Research Institute as a high school student at Hillside High School, encouraged by a teacher who recognized her strong writing skills. “I thought I was in trouble,” she says, recalling how her teacher pulled her aside. Instead, the teacher introduced her to…
