Biography
Bailey Brown completed her PhD in sociology from Columbia University. At Columbia, Brown previously earned a M. Phil. and M.A and was named Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow and a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow. Brown holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology with minors in urban education and Africana studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Brown was a Ronald E. McNair Scholar, a Leadership Alliance Fellow, graduated cum laude, and received top departmental honors for her senior thesis at Penn.
Brown is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Spelman College. Prior to her position at Spelman, Brown was a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University. Brown researches and teaches on the sociology of education, research methods, urban sociology, race and ethnicity, and inequality.
Brown’s publications appear in Sociology of Education, the Sage Encyclopedia for Higher Education and in the second edition of Focus on Social Problems: A Contemporary Reader. Brown’s forthcoming work appears in the second volume of the Handbook of Education Policy Research. Brown is also the recipient of multiple internal and external grant awards including the Gordon-Zeto Center for Global Education, The Carnegie Corporation and Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.
Brown’s forthcoming book Kindergarten Panic: Parental Anxiety and School Choice Inequality under contract with Princeton University Press explores how school choice policy reproduces inequality by increasing parents’ school decision-making labor. In recent projects, Brown explores middle-school curriculum in Georgia and Black women’s precollege and college experiences in computer science. Brown’s scholarship centers on how educational policies and practices shape how students and parents experience k-12 educational settings.
“If the past is another country, then I am its citizen. I am the relic of an experience most prefer not to remember, as if the sheer will to forget could settle or decide the matter of history. I am a reminder that twelve million crossed the Atlantic Ocean and the past is not yet over. I am the progeny of the captives. I am the vestige of the dead. And history is how the secular world attends to the dead.”
— Saidiya Hartman