is Professor and Head of Department, Black Studies,  University of Illinois at Chicago since 2022.  He was previously Texas A&M University, Associate Professor, 2005 to 2022,  and Interim Director, Race and Ethnic Studies Institute, 2006  to 2008, Assistant Professor of Sociology 1999 to 2005, and Loyola Marymount University, Associate Professor and Chair, African American Studies,  2008 to 2010. 

He uses comparative and historical approaches to the study of inequality that stress the inseparability of race, class, and gender. He is particularly interested in class formations in the African diaspora.  His work has been concerned with cultural and legal responses to social mobility among racial minorities, producing books and articles including Race, Social Reform, and the Making of a Middle Class: The American Missionary Association in Black Atlanta, 1870-1900 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), “Mixing Bodies and Minds: Race, Class and Mixed Schooling Controversies in Atlanta and New Orleans, 1874-1887” (Patterns of Prejudice, 2014), and “Other(ing) People’s Children: Social Mothering, Schooling, and Race in Late Nineteenth Century New Orleans and San Francisco” (Race, Gender and Class, 2014).  He is currently working on a book project that examines how racial narratives about middle class mobility were used to sustain or alter regional racial hierarchies in the US during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  He currently serves on the editorial board of Social Science History.

Dr. Jewell has a PhD (1998) and MA (1994) in Sociology from UCLA, and a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology (1991) from the University of California, Berkeley.