The Department of Black and Latino Studies

Dr. Vilna Bashi Treitler is Associate Professor in the Department of Black and Hispanic Studies at Baruch College and in the Department of Sociology at the Graduate Center. She creates and teaches scholarship that analyzes how group membership affects the life chances of its members, particularly as groups are incorporated into local and global socioeconomic structures like labor markets or racial hierarchies, and has earned distinctions for expertise in qualitative research methods.

She’s the author of The Ethnic Project: How Racial Fictions Buttress Ethnic Factions (forthcoming 2013, Stanford University Press) argues that beliefs in racial distinctions persist – despite 100 years of evidence proving them false – because ethnic groups use their social agency to fight for a better racial status, thus reifying rather than dismantling the racial structure. Her previous book, Survival of the Knitted: Immigrant Social Networks in a Stratified World (Stanford University Press, 2007), provides a new model of immigrant networks and shows how transnational networks shaped black migrants’ socioeconomic adaptation in New York, London, Canada, and the Caribbean. Survival was named Finalist for the Thomas-Znanecki Book Award given by the American Sociological Association's section on International Migration.

Dr. Treitler has a few works in progress. She is editing Race in International and Transracial Adoption (forthcoming 2013 with Palgrave Macmillan) that gathers contributions from 14 scholars from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and she is also conducting a separate National Science Foundation-funded study on race and adoption in the U.S. and Europe. She is also editing (with co-editor Manuela Boatca of Freie Universität Berlin) the book Global Inequality in the Modern Age, planned to be simultaneously published both as a special issue of Current Sociology and a Sage Manuscript.

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