The Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity is a scholarly collaborative that studies the causes and consequences of inequality and develops remedies for these disparities and their adverse effects.
Cook Center Faculty Affiliate Fenaba R. Addo, Ph.D., recently coauthored a review article in the Annual Review of Sociology that explores the racialized dynamics of debt and wealth in the United States. The paper synthesizes various categories of research that examine the sources of racial disparities in wealth and debt, and it explores how these disparities reflect…
Pop quiz: You’re a junior economics professor who’s about to go up for tenure. How should you pick your potential reviewers so that your odds of success are highest? How do (or even how can) you balance the big three of teaching, research, and service to the profession? And, most importantly, where do you find…
Faculty Affiliate John Purakal was recently featured in Duke Today as one of the three recipients of the 2025 Algernon Sydney Sullivan Award. Purakal is an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Duke University School of Medicine. His research interests include social drivers of health, racial & ethnic disparities of emergency care, and cardiovascular disease….
Since beginning in the mid-2010s, the Cook Center has steadily and robustly developed its research, programming, multimedia, and educational activities. In just its first decade of operations, the Center already has created a host of different working groups that have written and disseminated innumerable reports and academic papers, developed a minor in inequality studies in conjunction with the Duke History department, published multiple books, launched a podcast, and created and sustained programs to support young scholars and tenure-track researchers.
Q+A: Adam Hollowell and Keisha Bentley-Edwards Dr. Adam Hollowell serves as Senior Research Associate at the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity and Director of the Inequality Studies Minor at Duke University. He is also the Faculty Director of the Benjamin N. Duke Memorial Scholarship Program and Director of the Global Inequality Research Initiative. An…
Founding Director William A. Darity Jr. and Kirsten Mullen gave comments in conversation on the Marketplace Morning Report with host David Brancaccio and Marketplace’s Mitchell Hartman on the state of reparations after Tulsa’s mayor recently announced a $105 million reparations plan. Hartman has been reporting on the racial wealth gap through the lens of Tulsa,…
Faculty Affiliate Loneke Blackman Carr, Assistant Professor of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Connecticut, published a pilot study in Eating Behaviors evaluating a 12-week online intervention called SATISFY, designed to prevent weight gain by addressing emotional eating. In collaboration with Dr. Rachel Goode (UNC-Chapel Hill), the program combined appetite awareness training with lifestyle strategies…
