Dr. Chinyere Osuji, who came to BSOS as a Visiting Associate Professor during the 2021-2022 academic year, will be returning to the Department of African American Studies as an Associate Professor this fall.

Her research—which has won awards from the Population Association of America and the American Sociological Association Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities—examines how Blacks around the world understand and negotiate social interactions with racial and ethnic others and its implications for justice and equity. Her first book, Boundaries of Love: Interracial Marriage and the Meaning of Race (2019, NYU Press) compares how Black-White couples in Brazil and the United States understand and negotiate racial boundaries. Boundaries of Love relies on over 100 interviews with Black-White couples in these two countries to compare how national racial ideologies (colorblindness vs. racial democracy), gender and other social categories yield particular meanings of race and race-mixing.

Her experience navigating healthcare with a disability and her Nigerian immigrant background have inspired her current research conducting interviews with first and second-generation African immigrants in the nursing profession. She examines their social interactions in nursing school and working as RNs to understand white supremacy in the nursing profession from a critical and intersectional perspective. This project will provide a new lens to understand the racial politics of healthcare and the role of nursing in addressing health inequities-- issues made more salient with the Covid-19 pandemic.