Camille Z. Charles

Camille Z. Charles is Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Social Sciences, and Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

She is author of Won’t You Be My Neighbor: Race, Class and Residence in Los Angeles (Russell Sage, Fall 2006), which explores class- and race-based explanations for persisting residential segregation by race. She is also co-author of The Source of the River: The Social Origins of Freshmen at America’s Selective Colleges and Universities (2003, Princeton University Press). More recently, she is co-author of Taming the River: Negotiating the Academic, Financial, and Social Currents in Selective Colleges and Universities (2009, Princeton University Press), the second in a series based the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen, and “Race in the American Mind: From the Moynihan Report to the Obama Candidacy” (co-authored with Lawrence Bobo). She is near completion of a book on diversity among the Black Elite. 

Professor Charles earned her Ph.D. in 1996 from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she was a project manager for the 1992-1994 Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality. Her research interests are in the areas of urban inequality, racial attitudes and intergroup relations, racial residential segregation, minorities in higher education, and racial identity. Her work has appeared in Social Forces, Social Problems, Social Science Research, The DuBois Review, the American Journal of Education, the Annual Review of Sociology, the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the Chronicle of Higher Education and The Root.