PARTNER

Dr. David Kyuman Kim is a leading authority on morality and ethics, multiracial democracy, religion, and racial justice. An innovator who bridges the academy to the real world, Dr. Kim has been a thought-leader of initiatives in both the public and private sectors. He holds a B.A. in History from the University of Rochester and a masters and doctorate in philosophy of religion and theology from Harvard University. Most recently, Dr. Kim served as Executive Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University, where he revitalized the Center’s Research Institute, led the Mellon Arts Fellows Program, advised on implementation of the University’s new Institute on Race, and drove initiatives on technology, AI, and racial equity with Stanford's Institute for Human Centered AI (HAI). For nearly twenty years, Dr. Kim was Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies at Connecticut College, where he founded the first center on race and ethnicity at a liberal arts college. Dr. Kim has held appointments at Brown (as the Inaugural Visiting Professor in the Humanities), Stanford (as Senior Fellow at the CCSRE), the University of Pennsylvania (as Visiting Scholar at the Annenberg School for Communications), the Graduate Theological Union (as Distinguished Visiting Professor and Founder of the Center for Values, Ethics, and Culture), UC Berkeley School of Law (as Visiting Scholar at the Center on Comparative Equality), PolicyLink, and the Social Science Research Council, where he served as a Senior Advisor and Editor-at-Large of The Immanent Frame, the SSRC’s online platform on secularism, religion and public life. Author of Melancholic Freedom: Agency and the Spirit of Politics (Oxford, 2007) and co-editor of both The Postsecular in Question and Race, Religion, and Late Democracy, he is widely published in the fields of religious studies, Asian American studies, political theory, and race and democracy. Dr. Kim’s work on love and justice has been featured by Ellen McGirt in Fortune magazine and on numerous podcasts. Maria Shriver named Dr. Kim an “architect of change” and Cornel West calls him “the leading philosopher of religion and culture of his generation.” His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Truthout, and The Immanent Frame. At the height of the COVID pandemic, Dr. Kim became President of Horn Hospitality Group and established it as one of the leading restaurant groups in the Bay Area. Highly in demand as a public speaker, Dr. Kim’s podcast and book The Public Life of Love are in development. A food and wine enthusiast and classically-trained musician, he lives in Oakland, CA.

Specializations: race and racial justice; religion and public life; religious studies; race and ethnic studies; political theory; philosophy of religion; diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging; public speaking; multiracial democracy

PARTNER

Dr. Michael G. Hanchard is the Gustave C. Kuemmerle Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is Director of the Marginalized Populations Project. Widely acknowledged as one of the leading scholars of racism and democracy, Dr. Hanchard’s research and teaching encompass nationalism, racism, xenophobia, social movements and citizenship in comparative perspective. His publications include Orpheus and Power: The Movimento Negro of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1945-1988 (Princeton, 1994), Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil, editor, (Duke, 1999), and Party/Politics: Horizons in Black Political Thought (Oxford, 2006). His most recent book The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy (Princeton, 2018) received the 2019 Ralphe J. Bunche Award from the American Political Science Association for the best book on ethnic and cultural pluralism, and was named one of the Ten Best Books in 2018 by the Times Educational Supplement in London. Dr. Hanchard received his Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University, M.A. in International Relations from the New School for Social Research, and A.B. in International Relations from Tufts University. Dr. Hanchard has traveled and researched in various parts of the world, He has held visiting scholar positions at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, Universitaria Candido Mendes, Rio de Janeiro and the Universidade de Sao Carlos, Sao Paulo (Brazil), the University of Cartagena (Colombia), the Instituto Gramsci in Milan, Italy, the University of Ghana, Legon (West Africa), the University of Vienna, Austria, and Sciences Po in Paris, France. He has received grants and fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 2014-2015. In 2021, Dr. Hanchard was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A food and wine enthusiast, Prof. Hanchard travels widely when not based in Philadelphia, PA.

Specializations: Racism immigration and citizenship, nationalism, xenophobia, transnational social movements, statecraft, political and social theory.

PARTNER

A leading Public Health scholar and practitioner, Dr. Karina Christiansen is widely recognized for her experience in policy making and implementation for the public good. In her government work, she leads the development of community safety and quality of life projects throughout New York City. Her scholarly and policy interests are in discourse analysis, especially the power of narrative for achieving real world, positive social impacts. She holds a doctorate in Public Health and a Master's in Public Policy, both from Johns Hopkins University. She was a recipient of the C. Sylvia and Eddie C. Brown Community Health Scholarship, and the Center for a Livable Future-Lerner Fellow at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her dissertation Reframing “Food Deserts: The History of Urban Supermarket Access and its Public Policy Discourse demonstrated the enduring inequality in the marketplace for food retail in American cities and the inadequacy of a market-based problem frame to achieve racially equitable policy solutions. She is Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service in New York University.

Specializations: Program Design, Policy Development, Program Implementation, Strategic Planning, Community Violence Interventions, Public Health and Social Inequalities.