Rate My Professor Kathleen Blee

Blee’s research focuses on social movements, particularly racist, anti-Semitic, and far-right movements in the U.S. and Europe, racial violence, gender, and microsociology. Her ongoing projects include a funded prospective study of white supremacist disengagement with Pete Simi and Matthew DeMichele, and an ethnography of spatial and cultural factors in urban bus riding interactions. She has published nine books, including Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (1991, Pulitzer Prize nominee), The Road to Poverty (2000, co-authored), Inside Organized Racism (2002), Democracy in the Making (2012, Charles Tilly Award and Virginia Hodgkinson Prize), Women of the Right (2012, co-edited), Understanding Racist Activism (2018), and Out of Hiding (2024, co-authored), alongside over 100 journal articles and chapters. Her scholarship has earned the University of Pittsburgh Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award (2004), Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award (2007), Provost’s Mentoring Award (2007), Pennsylvania Sociological Society Distinguished Contribution Award (2006), John D. McCarthy Lifetime Achievement Award (2016), and Eastern Sociological Society Robin M. Williams Lectureship (2017). Funded by NSF, DOJ, and others, Blee advises the Center for Research on Extremism (C-Rex) in Oslo and consults pro bono for government, civic, and religious organizations on violent extremism.