Dr. Joyce M. Bell is an Associate Professor in the departments of Race, Diaspora & Indigeneity and Sociology at the University of Chicago.

Overall, her research deals with race, work & organizations, and social movements. Her intellectual work is motivated by big questions about race and racialized processes in social institutions. Her research—in the area of race, social movements, and the professions—is primarily concerned with how resistance to racism shapes the professions. Dr. Bell’s first book, The Black Power Movement and American Social Work (2014, Columbia University Press) details how social workers used the steam of the movement to create change in their profession during the lat 1960s and early 1970s.

Dr. Bell has also published research on the role of diversity discourse in institutions, higher education policy, and in the law. Dr. Bell is writing her second book, Black Power Lawyers: Unique and Unorthodox Methods, to be published by Oxford University Press. Currently she is developing courses and projects on Black Futures, visions for liberatory organizations, Black internationalism and Black fashion.

Bell holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Minnesota and a BA in Spanish and sociology from the University of St. Thomas. She is an Upward Bound & McNair Scholars alumna and is a past recipient of both the Minnesota and National TRIO Achievers Awards. Bell has also been awarded fellowships from Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the National Humanities Center, the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, and the University of Pittsburgh Humanities Center. She is the 2016 recipient of the American Sociological Association Section on Racial & Ethnic Minorities Distinguished Early Career Award.