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Vilna Bashi

Osborn Professor of Sociology

Biography

Vilna Bashi is the Osborn Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University. She is a sociologist and visual artist. Her scholarship theorizes about international migration, race and ethnicity and the dynamics of hierarchical socioeconomic structures both domestically and internationally. She has published several articles and books, including The Ethnic Project: Transforming Racial Fictions into Ethnic Factions (Stanford, 2013), a comparative historical analysis of US ethnic groups’ racialization named to the Zora Canon, the top 100 books ever written by an African American woman. She is the 2022 recipient of the Founders Award from the American Sociological Associations' (ASA's) Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities, and also the Association of Black Sociologists' A. Wade Smith Award for Teaching, Mentorship, and Service. She is also the 2020 recipient of the American Sociological Association’s Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award for scholarship in service to social justice. Bashi Treitler is currently at work on a memoir entitled Schooled, about her experiences with public school and higher education, and a related self-portrait series.

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Books/Monographs

Dynamics of Inequalities in Global Perspective (with Manuela Boatca) 

Race in Transnational and Transracial Adoption 

The Ethnic Project: Transforming Racial Fictions into Ethnic Factions 

Survival of the Knitted: Immigrant Social Networks in a Stratified World 

Special Section of Journal: Outsiders in the Academy, for Sociological Forum, March 2019

Selected Articles

Itzigsohn, J., Bashi, V., Oeur, F. B., & Torres, M. (2023). Is Sociology Worth Saving? A Conversation with José Itzigsohn and Vilna Bashi. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 9(3), 422–430.

"Get Yourself a No Committee"

"Is Compromise Possible?" Sociological Forum, February 2021 

"Outsider Scholars and Outsider Sociologists," in Sociology forum, 2019

"Racialization and its paradigms: From Ireland to North America," Current Sociology, March 2016 

"Dynamics of Inequalities in Global Perspective" (Introduction, with Manuela Boatca), Current Sociology, December 2015 

"The Racial State Of The Union: Understanding Race And Racial Inequality In The United States Of America," also published in Portuguese as O ESTADO RACIAL DA UNIÃO: compreendendo raça e desigualdade racial nos Estados Unidos da América," Cuaderno CRH, 2019. 

Bashi, Vilna. 2019. "Outsider Scholars and Outsider Sociologists," in a Special Section on Outsiders in the Academy, edited by Vilna Bashi. Sociological Forum, 34(1, March), pp. 201-212.

"Social Agency and White Supremacy in Immigration Studies," Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2015.