Swarthmore College, University of Pennsylvania
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Joseph Derrick Nelson is a visiting assistant professor of educational studies at Swarthmore College and a senior research fellow with the Center for the Study of Boys’ and Girls’ Lives at the University of Pennsylvania. Nelson is a sociologist of education, a school ethnographer, and a teacher educator who employs interdisciplinary frameworks to examine the interplay of identity, culture, and urban schooling. His scholarship to date has explored how school culture influences Black boys' identities; fostered their resistance to rigid gender norms; and interrogated how schools limit Black boys' learning and engagement during childhood and early-adolescence. These empirical projects led to publications with Harvard Educational Review, Culture, Society, and Masculinities, the Psychology of Men and Masculinity, and the guest co-editorship of a special issue on boys’ education with the Journal of Boyhood Studies. Nelson is currently on the executive committee for the MacArthur-funded Center for the Study of Men and Masculinity at Stony Brook University and serves as the education liaison for the NoVo-funded Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity at New York University. His research has been supported by the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the International Boys’ School Coalition. In his hometown of Milwaukee, Nelson taught first grade for two years in a single-sex classroom for Black and Latino boys.

Joseph Derrick Nelson - 2016