WashU Sociology's Fall 2025 Colloquium Series: Colin Gordon
Join the WashU Department of Sociology for our first installment of the Fall 2025 Colloquium Series, featuring Prof. Colin Gordon.
Colin Gordon is a Professor of History at the University of Iowa. He writes on the history of American public policy and political economy. He is a senior research consultant at Common Good Iowa for which he has written or co-written reports on health coverage, economic development, and wages and working conditions. His research areas include:
- 20th century U.S. history
- American public policy
- American political economy
- American urban history
He is the author of Patchwork Apartheid: Private Restriction, Racial Segregation, and Urban Inequality (Russell Sage Foundation, 2023), Citizen Brown: Race, Democracy, and Inequality in the St. Louis Suburbs (University of Chicago Press, 2019); Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Dead on Arrival: The Politics of Health in Twentieth Century America (Princeton University Press, 2003), and New Deals: Business, Labor and Politics, 1920-1935 (Cambridge University Press, 1994).
He has written for the Nation, In these Times, Jacobin, and Dissent (where he is a regular contributor). His digital projects include online companions to Patchwork Apartheid, Citizen Brown, Mapping Decline; the data-visualization project Growing Apart: A Political History of American Inequality (Institute for Policy Studies, 2013); and public history on the history of racial segregation in Iowa counties, and in St. Louis.
More about our guest: https://history.uiowa.edu/people/colin-gordon
Colloquia are open to a broader WashU audience; however, space is limited.
Students who are interested in more advanced sociological inquiry are strongly encouraged to attend.