Current Research

Professorville: The Racial History and Legacy of Faculty Housing

Since 2020, Miranda Joseph has been collaborating with Erin L. Durban to lead a research project with University of Minnesota students about faculty housing, university development, and racialized geographies. The research focuses on the University Grove faculty neighborhood where Joseph and Durban live, which UMN administrators modeled after the Stanford “Professorville” neighborhood in the early 20th century. With the “Professorville” project, Joseph adds to her existing contributions to critical university studies by taking up “faculty” as a category of professional managerial class workers and landowners who shape neighborhoods and cities in ways that exacerbate racial and economic inequality.

Two publications about the experimental collective ethnographic methods of the project geared towards disability accessibility are forthcoming in Unsettling Queer Anthropology: Foundations, Reorientations, and Departures (2024, Duke University Press) and The Disabled Anthropologist (2024, Routledge).