University of Virginia, College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Laurie Balfour

Lawrie Balfour

Professor, Politics

S395 Gibson Hall

Research Interests: African American political theory; reparation, Research Interests: slavery, Research Interests: global political thought

Biography

Lawrie Balfour is the author of Democracy’s Reconstruction: Thinking Politically with W. E. B. Du Bois (Oxford University Press) and The Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy(Cornell University Press).

Her articles on race, gender, and democracy have appeared in Political Theory, Perspectives on Politics, American Political Science Review, Hypatia, The Du Bois Review, and other journals and edited volumes.

She is working on a book manuscript on reparations for slavery and Jim Crow and on a range of projects on African American literature and politics.

Balfour has held fellowships from the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life at Harvard Divinity School, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. A recipient of multiple teaching awards, she was Laurence S. Rockefeller Visiting Associate Professor for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University in 2008-2009 and a visiting faculty member at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris in May 2012.

She was a member of the Journal of Politics editorial board from 2005-07 and 2009-11 and currently serves on the board of Politics, Groups, and Identities. Balfour was Director of Fellowships at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies from 2011-2013 and Interim Chair of Politics from January 2014-January 2015.