About

Professor Marcus Anthony Hunter is the Scott Waugh Endowed Chair in the Division of the Social Sciences, an Associate Professor of Sociology, and the Chair of the Department of African American Studies at UCLA. His research focuses on urban black life and inequality, with notable contributions including his book Black Citymakers: How the Philadelphia Negro Changed Urban America, which revisits the transformation of the Black Seventh Ward neighborhood in Philadelphia from a predominantly black area to a largely white upper middle class and commercial neighborhood. He is also the co-author of Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life, which explores the experiences and politics of Black Americans since 1900, and his most recent publication is Radical Reparations: Healing the Soul of A Nation. Professor Hunter's work has been recognized with awards and has benefited from grants from prominent institutions. His commentary and research have been featured in various academic journals and mainstream media outlets, emphasizing his influence in the fields of urban studies, race, and inequality.

Research topics

• Genetics
• Biology
• Cell biology
• Evolutionary biology
• Computational biology
• Pathology
• Medicine

Selected publications

• The quantum mechanics of race

  Ethnic and Racial Studies · 2025-02-25 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Full lives, full circles

  Identities · 2025-03-21

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• We Built This Thing! Reparations, Labor Acknowledgements, and the power of the Black City

  Journal of Urban History · 2025-10-23

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article explores and expounds upon Joe Trotter Jr.’s concept of the Black City. In so doing, this article details the national reparations movement and how it overlaps with the features and purposes of Trotter’s framework. The article closes by pairing Trotter’s powerful insights within the seven fold radical reparative apparatus and the import of labor acknowledgements as an untapped form of social repair.

  PublisherDOI

• Sociology better have my money

  Dialogues in Human Geography · 2024-04-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• African American Sexualities

  The SAGE Encyclopedia of LGBTQ Studies · 2024-01-01

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The American Assumption

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023-09-18

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract While the power of the American Dream persists, in Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880, W. E. B. Du Bois challenges the historicity of the concept by detailing a profoundly different origin story. Du Bois details an alternative history placing the American Dream as a mid-twentieth-century invention and outgrowth of the Great Depression. Rather than a founding premise, in Du Bois’s rendering of the American Dream, it is nothing more than a derivative of what he terms the “American Assumption.” With great historical specificity, Du Bois proves that the American Dream is intentionally devoid of the context of enslavement, land dispossession, and the events preceding and following the Civil War and Reconstruction. This essay combines key passages in Black Reconstruction with sociobiographical context to excavate key Du Boisian contributions to the sociology of knowledge, poverty, mobility, and inequality through the dissection of the American Dream mythology.

  PublisherDOI

• Space, place, and urban future 

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2023-03-17 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter offers what we term intersectional recovery—an intentional form and pathway for pragmatic and meaningful recovery, recasting, and reclamation of the overlooked and understudied biographies and geographies of Black queer figures. To do so, this chapter uses Bayard Rustin’s socio-political biography and the historical context of Black life in Los Angeles as a template to perform and demonstrate the returns to intersectional recovery. In so doing, we offer a replicable pathway to investigate and apprehend the convergence of urban geography and intersectionality to produce a more inclusive urban and identity-based analysis nested within the dynamic dialogue afoot in the broader field. Thus, this chapter utilizes Rustin and Los Angeles to amplify historical figures whose lives and contributions to the social sciences have been flattened through intentional neglect of intersectional methods.

  PublisherDOI

• U.S. Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation Funders' Briefing Program, January 19, 2021

  Health Equity · 2021-09-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• 4. How Ideas Stopped an Expressway in Philadelphia

  University of Pennsylvania Press eBooks · 2020-07-10

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Determinants of telomere length across human tissues

  Science · 2020 · 486 citations

  • Biology
  • Genetics
  • Evolutionary biology

  Telomere shortening is a hallmark of aging. Telomere length (TL) in blood cells has been studied extensively as a biomarker of human aging and disease; however, little is known regarding variability in TL in nonblood, disease-relevant tissue types. Here, we characterize variability in TLs from 6391 tissue samples, representing >20 tissue types and 952 individuals from the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project. We describe differences across tissue types, positive correlation among tissue types, and associations with age and ancestry. We show that genetic variation affects TL in multiple tissue types and that TL may mediate the effect of age on gene expression. Our results provide the foundational knowledge regarding TL in healthy tissues that is needed to interpret epidemiological studies of TL and human health.

  DOI

Frequent coauthors

• Zandria F. Robinson

  22 shared

• Sarah Kim-Hellmuth

  18 shared

• Ayellet V. Segrè

  Broad Institute

  17 shared

• Manuel Muñoz-Aguirre

  Barcelona Institute for Science and Technology

  16 shared

• Roderic Guigó

  Pompeu Fabra University

  16 shared

• Barbara E. Stranger

  14 shared

• Meritxell Oliva

  14 shared

• Diego Garrido-Martín

  Universitat de Barcelona

  12 shared

Education

• Ph.D., African American Studies

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2006

• M.A., African American Studies

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2002

• B.A., African American Studies

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1999

Awards & honors

• FINALIST for C. Wright Mills Award 2013
• Honorable Mention, Komarovsky Award, Eastern Sociological So…