Speaker Series: Kumar Ramanathan

To register, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org. 

Kumar Ramanathan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at UIC. He earned his Ph.D. in political science at Northwestern University, and previously held positions as a Doctoral Fellow at the American Bar Foundation and Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Chicago.

His research explores the relationships between law, public policy, and inequality in the United States. This includes projects on American political development, urban politics, and democratic accountability. His work has been published in Perspectives on Politics, Studies in American Political Development, Urban Affairs Review, Political Research Quarterly, the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, Cleveland State Law Review, and The Forum.

His book manuscript, tentatively titled Building a Civil Rights Agenda: The Democratic Party and the Origins of Racial Liberalism, explores how party politics during the 1930s-60s shaped the content of landmark civil rights legislation. The dissertation on which the book manuscript is based received an honorable mention from the American Political Science Association’s Politics and History Section.