Brooke Neely
Brooke Neely, Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology
B.A. Whitman College 2003; M.A. University of California, Santa Barbara 2006; Ph.D. University of California, Santa Barbara 2011.
Areas of interest: Cultural sociology, racial and ethnic studies, space and place, land use and the environment, American Indian studies, whiteness, collective memory, tourism, social inequality, social problems, social theory, gender and feminism, qualitative methods.
At Whitman, Brooke teaches courses on social problems, gender, and race and ethnicity. She participates in the senior sociology capstone seminar and advises sociology majors in their senior thesis research projects. And she is teaching the first-year Encounters course in 2012-2013. Her primary line of research explores racial politics and collective memory around Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse memorials in the Black Hills of South Dakota. These giant mountain carving memorials symbolize a long history of land conflict between American Indians and the United States, and they serve as focal points for contested knowledge over race, history, and the rightful ownership of the land. Brooke also studies the relationship between racial and spatial processes (e.g. residential segregation, land use, colonization), which can be found in a recent article in Ethnic and Racial Studies (2011).
After nearly a decade, Brooke was very excited to return to Whitman and the sociology department, where as a student she wrote a senior thesis and learned the ways of sociology. When not grading papers, Brooke can usually be found in the company of her husband Nick and her enormous brown tabby cat Bucky.
Email: neelybe@whitman.edu
345 Boyer Ave.