Dr. Sandra Patton-Imani

Associate Professor of American Studies

 

 

Office: 102 Howard Hall

Phone: Office: 271-2898

E-Mail: sandra.patton-imani@drake.edu

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Sandra Patton-Imani is Associate Professor of American Studies in the Department for the Study of Culture and Society. Prior to arriving at Drake she taught Women's Studies and African American Studies at Macalester College. In 1999/2000 she was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is a former Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota Law School. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. While at the University of Maryland she taught Women's Studies and African American Studies, and served as Assistant Director of the Curriculum Transformation Project. She has published a number of essays on transracial adoption, as well as several articles on welfare reform co-authored with Bonnie Thornton Dill and Maxine Baca Zinn. She is the author of BirthMarks: Transracial Adoption in Contemporary America, released by New York University Press in 2000, which explores the issue of transracial adoption through in-depth interviews with adult African American and multiracial adoptees raised by White parents. She is currently working on a documentary version of BirthMarks, which focuses on the life experiences of transracial adoptees of all racial-ethnic groups. Her next book, Ghosts in the Tree: Adoption and the "Search" for Self, is a work in progress that draws on interviews with both transracial and "inracial" adoptees, along with her own experiences as an adoptee, to explore searches and reunions with birth parents.

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Classes taught by Dr. Patton-Imani

13. Introduction to Sociology: Society, Culture, and African Americans

 

105 Race, Gender, and Poverty

 

156 Representing Race: Life History Research

 

150. Race, Family, & Identity in the U.S

 

Documenting Lives

Constructing Normal