2019 MSS Annual Meeting

Program Plenary Speakers

Aldon Morris, Ph.D., is the Leon Forrest Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Northwestern University. Long-known for his award-winning scholarship on the Civil Rights Movement, Dr. Morris’s ongoing research project explores the role of W. E. B. Du Bois in the founding of American Sociology and led to the publication of The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology (University of California Press, 2015). Du Bois, he argues, was central in producing the first major empirical sociological studies in America and building the first school of American sociology. This project explores the sociological, theoretical, and institutional factors responsible for Du Bois’ work being marginalized by the sociology profession. You can learn more about Dr. Morris at https://www.sociology.northwestern.edu/people/faculty/core/aldon-morris.html

Tey Meadow, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Columbia University and a rising star in the field. Her scholarship spans the domains of law, politics, the family, sexuality and gender, with a specific focus on the creation and maintenance of social classifications. Her first book, Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century, is an ethnographic and interview-based study of the first generation of families affirming and facilitating gender nonconformity in children. In it, she offers sociologists a new theory of gender, one that accounts for the intricate ties between personal identities and social institutions. Dr. Meadow also holds a J.D. from Fordham University School of Law. You can learn more about her at https://teymeadow.com/.

Katherine Pérez, J.D., is the first Director of the Coelho Center for Disability Law, Policy, and Innovation at the Loyola Marymount Law School in Los Angeles. She is an attorney, scholar, and recognized leader who launched the National Coalition for Latinxs with Disabilities (CNLD), an intersectional organization that advocates on important issues and provides a positive space for the disabled Latinx community. Her sense of disability justice was formed at a young age as she grew up with psychiatric disability and is a sister to an autistic woman with intellectual disability. Ms. Pérez graduated from the UCLA School of Law, with specializations in Critical Race Studies, Law and Philosophy and Public Interest Law and Policy. Currently she is also a doctoral candidate in Disability Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago where she is writing a dissertation on the experiences of undocumented Latinx college students with disabilities. You can learn more about Ms. Pérez at https://www.lls.edu/coelhocenter/aboutus/director/.