IDEAL Faculty Hires in the School of Humanities and Sciences

Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences (H&S) announces the first of their faculty cluster hires on the impacts of race in the United States as part of the university’s Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Access in a Learning Environment (IDEAL) initiative. The school welcomes Destin Jenkins to the Department of History and Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh to the Department of Religious Studies. They will join the H&S faculty as assistant professors on September 1.

“We are very pleased to have these superb scholars join H&S,” said Debra Satz, the Vernon R. and Lysbeth Warren Anderson Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences. “One of the school’s top priorities is to diversify areas of research and teaching as well as our faculty. Provost Persis Drell has accelerated this goal with the IDEAL initiative, and the university is seeing the results of her vision.”

Jenkins is a scholar in 20th-century U.S. urban history, who studies how financial networks have helped create racial inequalities in U.S. cities. In 2021, he published a monograph, The Bonds of Inequality: Debt and the Making of the American City (University of Chicago Press), and a collection of essays, co-edited with Justin Leroy, Histories of Racial Capitalism (Columbia University Press).

“He builds on our department’s existing strengths in modern history and the history of capitalism,” said Caroline Winterer, the William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies and chair of the Department of History.