This event has been CANCELED and will hopefully be rescheduled for Fall 2018.

Co-sponsored with the Department of Sociology.

Most research on the demographic transitions of human populations concentrate on Eurasian and North African societies.  The “native” populations of sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, Island South-east Asia, Australia, New Guinea, and the pacific Islands receive treatment, mainly as concerns what happened to them, and what is happening to them after they were discovered and subjugated by western Europeans. Zuberi suggests turning this equation upside down, that during the past 500 years the transformation of the human population along racial lines has been a process of dividing humans into 1st and 2nd class citizens as a critical aspect of demographic transitions.

Zuberi is the Lasry Family Professor of Race Relations, and Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He has been a visiting professor at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda; the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania; in 2014 he held the Chair of the Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), in Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil; and in 2016 he served as the Distinguished Visiting Professor for the Coordination Foundation for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel- CAPES at the University of Brasilia and the Federal University of Bahia. During his time at the University of Pennsylvania, he has served as the Chair of the Graduate Group in Demography, the Director of the African Studies Program, the Director of the Afro-American Studies Program, and Faculty Associate Director of the Center for Africana Studies. From 2002 to 2008, he served as the founding Director of the Center for Africana Studies. From 2007 to 2013, he served as Chair of the Department of Sociology.

Zuberi is the author of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot: The Mortality Cost of Colonizing Liberia in the Nineteenth-Century, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1995; Thicker than Blood: How Racial Statistics Lie, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2001; Más espeso que la sangre: la mentira del análisis estadístico según teorías biológicas de la raza, published by Universidad Nacional de Colombia, in Bogotá in 2013; and Africa Independence: How Africa Shapes the World, published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers in 2015. He has completed a manuscript on written and oral history in pre-colonial West Africa, entitled Black Words and Memory (forthcoming). He is the series editor of the “General Demography of Africa” (a multi-volume series). He has written more than 70 scholarly articles, and edited or co-edited eight volumes. These edited volumes include White Logic, White Methods: Racism and Methodology (with Eduardo Bonilla-Silva) that was awarded the Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award by the American Sociological Association. Professor Zuberi is currently completing a book on the Demography of Race.