Amy Ansell is the dean of the Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies, where she has served in her decanal capacity and as a tenured professor of Sociology since January 2010. Ansell’s scholarly interests revolve around the intersection of race and ethnicity, political sociology, cultural studies, and human rights. She is the author of Race and Ethnicity: The Key Concepts (Routledge, 2013) and New Right, New Racism: Race and Reaction in the United States and Britain (NYU/Macmillan, 1997), which won the Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Book Award and the Myers Center Award. She is the editor of Unraveling the Right: The New Conservatism in American Thought and Politics (Westview, 1998), as well as numerous book chapters, articles, and reviews on topics such as comparative race relations, reparations politics, right-wing ideology, and ethnicity and democracy in Africa (South Africa and Zimbabwe).
Ansell was formerly a tenured full professor of sociology at Bard College (1992–2009), where she taught courses on race and ethnicity, power and powerlessness, language and symbolic politics, culture wars, and cultural studies. While at Bard, she also served at various times as associate dean of academic affairs, director of international programs, director of the program in international education, and chair of the Social Studies Division. She has also served in visiting positions at Cambridge University (UK), the University of Witwatersrand (South Africa), the Human Sciences Research Council (South Africa), the South African Human Rights Commission, the University of Zimbabwe, and the University of Juba (South Sudan).
Ansell holds an MPhil and a PhD in social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge and a BA in philosophy of social change from the University of Michigan.