Stephen Small is Director of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues (ISSI) and Professor of African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley. He earned his Ph.D. in Sociology at UC Berkeley where he was a graduate student trainee in what is now ISSI’s Graduate Fellows Program. His teaching focuses primarily on African Americans in the post-Civil Rights period, but he necessarily makes comparisons with earlier periods and with other racial and ethnic groups in the contemporary period. His current research is organized around the social scientific analysis of contemporary racial formations and addresses links between historical structures and contemporary manifestations of racial formations in the United States and elsewhere in the African Diaspora. Axes of stratification shaped by gender/race intersections, and by class and nation are central to his work.
His most recent book is In the Shadows of the Big House: 21st Century Antebellum Slave Cabins and Heritage Tourism in Louisiana (University Press of Mississippi, 2023). He is currently writing a book on Black culture in Liverpool at the end of the 20th century, to be published by Liverpool University Press in 2024. Among his other books, he is co-author of 1981 Black Liverpool, Past and Present, author of 20 Questions and Answers on Black Europe and co-editor of New Perspectives on Slavery and Colonialism in the Caribbean and Black Europe and the African Diaspora.
His many other publications include a recent article, ‘How Imperial Liverpool became an African city, and why it matters’, in History Matters (2022). Forthcoming publications include: ‘De-commemoration in Great Britain’ chapter in De-commemoration: Making Sense of Contemporary Calls for Tearing Down Statues and Renaming Places, edited by Sarah Gensburger and Jenny Wüstenberg, 2023; ‘Following Father’s Footsteps: slavery, imperialism and the William Ewart Gladstone Memorial Statue in Liverpool City Centre’, chapter in Fallen Monuments and Contested Memorials edited by Juilee Decker, 2023: and ‘Reparations for imperialism: examining legacies and implications beyond slavery in the British Empire’, chapter in Slavery, Colonialism, and Reparations edited by Adekeye Adebajo, University of Pretoria, 2023.
