Juliet Hooker
Juliet Hooker is a Nicaraguan-born political scientist and the Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in Political Science at Brown University. She specializes in racial justice, the theory of multiculturalism, and the political thought of the Americas.
Hooker grew up on Nicaragua’s Afro-Caribbean coast before moving to Managua. She earned a BA in political science from Williams College in 1994, then a MA (1998) and PhD (2001) in government from Cornell University. After a Rockefeller Post-Doctoral fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin in 2001, she joined UT Austin’s faculty in 2002 and stayed there until 2017, when she moved to Brown University.
She has published three books: Race and the Politics of Solidarity (2009), Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos (2017), and Black Grief/White Grievance (2023). In Race and the Politics of Solidarity, Hooker argues that appeals to solidarity and multiculturalism can obscure how racial hierarchies are still built into society, using Nicaragua’s multicultural policies as a case study. The book has been praised for contributing to multicultural theory, critical race theory, democratic theory, and Latin American politics.
Her 2017 book, Theorizing Race in the Americas, analyzes the ideas of Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and José Vasconcelos to explore race, nation, and identity in the Americas. It received the American Political Science Association’s Ralph J. Bunche Award in 2018 for the best scholarly work on ethnic and cultural pluralism.
Hooker has also written for various political science journals and outlets, and her work has been cited in major media outlets. She has served on several American Political Science Association committees.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 13:12 (CET).