INAUGURAL EVENT

The inaugural for the Center on Urban Research & Public Policy (CURPP) was held on September 12, 2006 at 4:00 p.m. in Graham Chapel at Washington University in St. Louis. The inaugural lecture was given by the distinguished Professor Lawrence D. Bobo, who is the Martin Luther King Jr. Centennial Professor at Stanford University. The title of his talk was “Facing the Urban Challenge: Where Inequality, Race and Immigration Meet.” He is the director of Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies on Race and Ethnicity and of the program in African and African American Studies. He is formerly the Tishman-Diker Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. His research concerns race, ethnicity, politics and social inequality. Among his numerous honors and awards are being elected to the National Academy of Science, serving as a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and as a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. He has delivered the Yinger Lecture at Oberlin College, the Frazier Lecture at Yale University, and the Katz-Newcomb Lecture at the University of Michigan. His research has appeared in top journals across the social science disciplines including the American Political Science Review, the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Public Opinion Quarterly. He is a founding editor for the Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race published by Cambridge University Press. He is co-author of the award winning book Racial Attitudes in America: Trends and Interpretations (1997, Harvard University Press), senior editor for Prismatic Metropolis: Inequality in Los Angeles (2000, Russell Sage Foundation), and co-editor of Racialized Politics: The Debate on Racism in America (2000, University of Chicago Press). His forthcoming book is entitled Prejudice in Politics: Public Opinion, Group Position, and the Wisconsin Treaty Rights Dispute to be published by Harvard University Press (March 2006). He is currently conducting research on the “Race, Crime and Public Opinion” project.

The inaugural lecture was free and open to the public, with a reception immediately following.