Joseph Derrick Nelson, PhD

Assistant Professor and Senior Research Fellow, Swarthmore College

Joseph Derrick Nelson, PhD is Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at Swarthmore College, and affiliated faculty with the Black Studies Program. He is also a Senior Research Fellow with the Center for the Study of Boys’ and Girls’ Lives at the University of Pennsylvania. His research to date has employed interdisciplinary frameworks to examine race, boyhood, and education, and within learning environments that largely serve Black students from neighborhoods with concentrated poverty. In his hometown of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he taught first-grade in a single-sex class of Black and Latino boys, in the high poverty neighborhood where he grew up.