As a professor, Dr. Alondra Nelson said her objective has been to help students discover and understand the complexities of the world around them. (Photo by Thomas Sayers Ellis)
Growing up in a middle-class family in San Diego, education was centrally important to her. The first child of four, Nelson acknowledges how finances could have been stretched thin; however, her parents were able to send their children to private schools as well as expose them to the arts.
“(Education) was really important to (my parents) and so it became important to me,” she says.
At the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), Nelson studied anthropology as an undergraduate, including archaeology, which allowed her to combine her love for ancient communities as well as contemporary culture. She also cultivated a background in the African diaspora by minoring in both African history and Caribbean literature.
On the recommendation of her mentor and American studies scholar, Dr. George Lipsitz, Nelson enrolled at New York University (NYU), with an interest in becoming an Americanist, working particularly on African-American culture and history.
“The program was attractive to me because I knew I could work on a U.S. American project if I wanted to, but it also gave me a lot of methodological freedom so I could use my social science skills and what I learned in anthropology as an undergraduate and burnish those working with sociology professors at NYU,” she says. “And at the same time, I could take classes on media, the cultures of the Internet, and critical and social theory and really broaden my horizons.”
In her research, Nelson has studied themes that explore how African-Americans respond to scientific and technological developments. Her work has been supported by entities such as the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
