Welcome! I am katrina quisumbing king (surname: quisumbing king, pronounced kiss-uhm-bing king),* Assistant Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University.

My research agenda asks how race and empire shape institutional development. I pay special attention to (1) statecraft (2) the politics of sociological knowledge and (3) decolonial social justice efforts. From how state actors conceive of racial difference and concretize it in policies about migration, citizenship, and trade to how sociologists consider race and empire in their theories and research design, I show how ideas of human difference and practices of political domination shape durable social structures. I take a global and historical approach to understanding racial and imperial formations and their consequences.

My primary area of research focuses on questions of racial classification and exclusion from a historical perspective that foregrounds the state’s authority to manage populations. In this area of work, I ask how imperial states administer race and how ideas of racial difference shape statecraft. I am particularly concerned with how state actors conceive of and make decisions around race and citizenship. My research recenters empire as a key U.S. political formation. In the U.S. context, I focus especially on how the state defines colonized populations and how these people fit into the U.S. racial order. I am currently pursuing two major projects along these lines. The first addresses how ambiguity and conflicts over race shape imperial statecraft, and the second explores the variations in imperial state classification of colonial people and territories.

I earned my Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 2018. Prior to joining Northwestern, I spent two years as a Provost's Postdoctoral Scholar at University of Southern California. 

*I do not capitalize my name, but journals have required it. It does not bother me if you capitalize my name.