Ellen Berrey

Ellen Berrey is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto and an affiliated scholar of the American Bar Foundation. Her work examines the crossroads of culture, law, organizations, racism and inequality in the United States. Her areas of interest include the symbolic politics of diversity, affirmative action in college admissions, university and corporate diversity policies, campus hate speech, employment discrimination law, social movements, and sustainability law and politics. She previously has served on the faculties of the University at Buffalo SUNY and University of Denver.

Dr. Berrey is the author of The Enigma of Diversity: The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice (University of Chicago Press 2015), which was awarded the 2016 Herbert Jacob book prize of the Law and Society Association as well as book awards from the Sociology of Law and Sociology of Culture sections of the American Sociological Association. The Enigma of Diversity was profiled in the New Yorker in 2017. A Salon article based on it, "Diversity Is for White People," has been circulated on social media more than 33,000 times.

Her second book, with Robert Nelson and Laura Beth Nielsen, Rights on Trial: How Workplace Discrimination Law Perpetuates Inequality (2017 University of Chicago Press) received the 2018 book award honorable mention from the ASA Sociology of Law section.

Her research has also been published in American Behavioral Scientist, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, City & Community, Contexts, Critical Sociology, Du Bois Review, Law & Society Review, Sociological Science, The Tennessee Journal of Business Law, and Theory & Society.

Her research has been supported with funding from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and numerous private foundations and universities.

See also: ellenberrey.com, rightsontrial.com