Amanda Boston
- Assistant Professor
Dr. Amanda Boston is an assistant professor in the Department of Africana Studies. Her research, writing, and teaching focus on twentieth-century and contemporary African American urban history, politics, and popular culture. Her book project is entitled The “New” New York: Race, Space, and Power in Gentrifying Brooklyn, and explores the racial operations of gentrification in her hometown of Brooklyn, New York. In it, she illuminates how histories of race and structural racism and the rise of colorblindness and neoliberalism have shaped the making and unmaking of the borough’s Black communities.
Boston has received research funding and support from the Ford Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Institute for Citizens & Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation), and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, among other sources. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Africana Studies from Brown University, as well as her M.A. in Political Science and B.A. in Political Science and African & African American Studies from Duke University. Boston is a trustee emerita of Brown University, an alumni trustee of the New York City-based Prep for Prep program, and a member of the board of directors of the Municipal Art Society of New York. Before joining the University of Pittsburgh, she was a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at New York University.
Areas of Specialization
- African American History and Politics
- Black Geographies
- Black Popular Culture
- Gentrification
- Race and Structural Racism
- Urban Studies
Education & Training
- BA, Duke University, Political Science and African & African American Studies
- MA, Duke University, Political Science
- MA, Brown University, Africana Studies
- PhD, Brown University, Africana Studies