Nina Banks

Nina Banks is Associate Professor of Economics at Bucknell University with affiliations in Women's and Gender Studies and Critical Black Studies. She serves as past president of the National Economic Association (NEA) and sits on the Board of Directors of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). Previously, she served on the board of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) and editorial boards of Feminist Economics and The Review of Black Political Economy.

Dr. Banks earned her Ph.D. from University of Massachusetts at Amherst and her B.A. from Hood College. Her research makes visible the unseen work of Black and marginalized women by developing an economics of unpaid work and community activism against racial disparities. Her determination to restore Black women to U.S. economic history led to the recovery of Sadie T.M. Alexander's economic thought.

Her work focuses on political economy, the political economy of gender and race, and the economics of family migration. Dr. Banks developed a framework reconceptualizing political activism as unpaid work, arguing that the community should be elevated as a site of production alongside firms and households. She founded the annual Freedom and Justice conference bringing together scholars dedicated to finding solutions to economic problems facing racialized communities.

Analysis of her recent publications reveals consistent focus on Black women's economic experiences, community work, and racial justice. Her research traces unpaid community work to early 20th century cooperative movements and examines how this work addresses government-neglected services. She has made significant contributions to recovering the economic thought of Sadie T.M. Alexander, identifying her as the first Black American economist who advocated for federal job guarantees decades before Hyman Minsky.

• President of the National Economic Association
• Board member of the Economic Policy Institute
• Editor of Democracy, Race, and Justice: The Speeches and Writings of Sadie T. M. Alexander (Yale University Press, 2021)
• Featured in New York Times, NPR, Economist, Wall Street Journal, and other major media outlets

Dr. Banks teaches courses including African Women & Social Action, Gender, Race, and Poverty, Gender and Migration, Intermediate Political Economy, and Economic History of Women in the U.S. Her research has been supported by numerous grants that have enabled her archival work on Sadie Alexander despite significant challenges including parenting responsibilities and Alexander's difficult-to-decipher handwriting. She has collaborated with undergraduate research assistants at Bucknell to reconstruct Alexander's economic thought from fragmented archival materials.