Joseph Derrick Nelson, PhD is a writer, teacher-educator, and sociologist of education. He is Associate Professor of Educational Studies at Swarthmore College, where he is also Chair of the Black Studies Program, and Affiliated Faculty with the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. He is Research Director of the School Participatory Action Research Collaborative at the University of Pennsylvania, and he is Research Affiliate with the Institute for Urban and Minority Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he is also Adjunct Associate Professor in the Sociology and Education Program.His research examines how schools can be what he calls “(re)imaginative” and “liberatory” institutions for Black children and youth, particularly Black boys during childhood and early adolescence. To date, his scholarship has been largely situated within single-gender schools for Black and Afro-Latinx boys, and it has explored how race and gender stereotypes influence Black boys’ identities and academic success in U.S. middle schools, specifically high-achieving Black boys from neighborhoods with concentrated poverty. His book project under contract with Harvard Education Press is entitled, "(Re)Imagining Black Boyhood: Portraits of Academic Success during the Middle School Years."In public media, his research has been featured in the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and on National Public Radio. In the United States and abroad, he has presented on his research at The White House Summit for Children’s Media and Toys, the Ideas Festival of the Aspen Institute, and the International Boys’ School Coalition. With funding from the Spencer Foundation, he co-founded (with Niobe Way, EdD) The Listening Project: Fostering Curiosity and Connection in Middle Schools—a school-based project that trains middle school students on a method of "Transformative Interviewing." Its goal is to cultivate a mode of listening and curiosity among middle schoolers that challenge how race and gender stereotypes contribute to negative peer relations. In 2021, he became the inaugural Fellow of the Boys’ Club of New York, and Co-Chair of the Task Force on Boys In School with the American Psychological Association. He was also named Editor of the historic journal Men and Masculinities.Prior to Swarthmore, he held postdoctoral fellowships with the Ford Foundation, and the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation. In the high-poverty neighborhood where he grew up in Milwaukee, he taught a first-grade cohort of Black and Afro-Latinx boys.