William A. (“Sandy”) Darity Jr. is Arts & Sciences Professor of Public Policy Studies and Economics,Chair of African and African American Studies and director of the Research Network on Racial and Ethnic Inequality at Duke University.

Previously he served as director of the Institute of African American Research, director of the Moore Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program, director of the Undergraduate Honors Program in economics, and director of Graduate Studies at the University of North Carolina.

Darity’s research focuses on inequality by race, class and ethnicity, stratification economics, schooling and the racial achievement gap, North-South theories of trade and development, skin shade and labor market outcomes, the economics of reparations, the Atlantic slave trade and the Industrial Revolution, doctrinal history and the social psychological effects of unemployment exposure.

He was a fellow at the National Humanities Center (1989-90) and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors (1984). He is a past president of the National Economic Association and the Southern Economic Association. He also has taught at Grinnell College, the University of Maryland at College Park, the University of Texas at Austin, Simmons College and Claremont-McKenna College. He is Editor in Chief of  new edition of the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, (Macmillan Reference, 2008.)

His most recent books are Economics, Economists, and Expectations: Microfoundations to Macroapplications (2004) (co-authored with Warren Young and Robert Leeson) and a volume co-edited with Ashwini Deshpande titled Boundaries of Clan and Color: Transnational Comparisons of Inter-Group Disparity (2003) both published by Routledge. He has published or edited 10 books and more than 200 articles in professional journals.

Darity lives with his family in Durham, N.C. where he plays harmonica in a local blues band, occasionally coaches youth sport, and enjoys reading science and speculative fiction.