Berkley Center

Freeden Blume Oeur is an associate professor of sociology at Tufts University whose work centers on anti-Black racism, childhood, and Du Boisian traditions. He integrates feminist and humanistic insights to challenge "adultist" and "presentist" biases in sociology. He is the author of the award-winning ethnography Black Boys Apart: Racial Uplift and Respectability in All-Male Public Schools (2018) and co-editor of Gender Replay and Unmasking Masculinities: Men and Society (2017). Recently honored with the 2025 ASA Mid-Career Award, his research spans gender, education, and African American intellectual history.

Ara Francis is a microsociologist exploring the cultural history of the hospice model and the "death positive" movement. Her current research examines how white femininity shapes modern ideals of dying well. Author of Family Troubles: Middle-Class Parents, Children's Problems, and the Disruption of Everyday Life (2015), which analyzed middle-class parenting and childhood disability, she now focuses on the intersections of identity and morality. She teaches courses on the sociological perspective, social control, and the complex realities of death and dying at the College of the Holy Cross. 

Becky Yang Hsu is an associate professor of sociology and senior fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University, where she is also affiliated with the Asian Studies Program and the Graduate School's M.S. in Health and the Public Interest Program. She is directing a research group on the topic of Culture and Society as part of the Georgetown University Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues. She is the author of Borrowing Together: Microfinance and Cultivating Social Ties (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and co-editor, with Richard Madsen, of The Chinese Pursuit of Happiness: Anxieties, Hopes, and Moral Tensions in Everyday Life (University of California Press, 2019); Hsu is currently completing a single-authored book, Serenity: Happiness and Death in China (University of Chicago Press), which focuses on family, bereavement, and well-being. She was project leader (PI) of a John Templeton Foundation funded project, "The Concept of Fu in Contemporary China: Searching for Well-Being, Purpose, and the Good Life" (2013-2016). The Washington Post featured two videos from her fieldwork (“What people around the world mean when they say they’re happy,” February 3, 2016). She is on the editorial boards of two journals, the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion and Social Science and Medicine—Mental Health. She holds a B.A. from Yale University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University.

Jyoti Puri is a feminist sociologist and Guggenheim Fellow whose research spans queer studies, postcolonial theory, and critical death studies. Her work examines how states regulate bodies, sexualities, and mortality, specifically focusing on marginalized subjects. Author of the award-winning Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle Against the Antisodomy Law in India's Present (2016), she currently investigates how South Asian migrants navigate death in North America. Recognized with the 2023 Simon-Gagnon Lifetime Achievement Award, Puri is a leading voice in decentering Eurocentric sociological theory.

Deborah Streahle is a historian of medicine whose work examines how twentieth-century activism reshaped the way Americans experience death and dying. Streahle has taught extensively on public health. Her curatorial portfolio includes her current role at the Intrepid Museum and five previous exhibitions focused on medical history and disability. She holds a Ph.D. in History of Science and Medicine from Yale.