Jordanna Matlon

Dr. Jordanna Matlon is an Associate Professor at the School of International Service (SIS) at American University. She holds a PhD in Sociology from UC Berkeley, along with MA and BA degrees from UC Berkeley and Columbia University. Her research focuses on race, colonial legacies, Blackness as an analytic framework, and the intersections of gender, climate catastrophe, and racial capitalism. She is the author of A Man among Other Men: The Crisis of Black Masculinity in Racial Capitalism (Cornell UP, 2022), which has garnered 12 awards across disciplines, including the ASA Distinguished Scholarly Book Award and ISA John Ruggie Award. Her new book under contract with Polity Press, Blackness as Being: Black Survival in the Age of Climate Catastrophe, bridges climate change, surplus populations, and racial capitalism. Dr. Matlon has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse and has been recognized with the 2024 SIS Faculty Award for Scholarship and 2022 William Cromwell Teaching Award.

Her work appears in journals like American Sociological Review, Antipode, and Contexts. She has engaged in media interviews, podcasts, and symposia discussing her research, including a Left of Black podcast appearance and contributions to Black Perspectives. Her courses include topics on global inequality, sociological theory, and race in world political economy.

• Education: PhD (UC Berkeley), MA (UC Berkeley), BA (Columbia University)
• Research Interests: Black masculinity, racial capitalism, urban Africa, climate catastrophe, decolonizing sociology
• Awards: 12+ book prizes across ASA, ISA, and other disciplinary associations

Dr. Matlon’s scholarship emphasizes the paradoxes of Black survival and liberation amid systemic crises, with a focus on postcolonial African contexts and diasporic connections.