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Alicia Simmons
Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology
Department/Office Information
Africana and Latin American StudiesAlicia D. Simmons is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Africana and Latin American Studies at 51³Ô¹ÏÍø. She earned a B.A. in sociology from Hartwick College, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from Stanford University. She was a lecturer and post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University, before coming to 51³Ô¹ÏÍø in 2011.
Professor Simmons is a social psychologist who examines the intersections of media, race, and politics in the United States. She studies the nature of Americans' racial attitudes toward Blacks and their opinions about public policies that obviously or tacitly invoke race. She further explores how these attitudes are created, triggered, altered, and reinforced by news media exposure. Her work is interdisciplinary, incorporating sociology, psychology, communications, political science, and racial/ethnic studies. It is also multi-method, using surveys, experiments, and content analysis.
She maintains three branches of research. The first uses surveys and experiments to investigate the nature and causes of racial attitudes and public policy preferences that contribute to - or alleviate - racial inequality. The second use on content analyses to study the nature of news media messages; her current work explores coverage of cases where police kill unarmed Blacks, such as the deaths of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd. A final branch of her research centers on advancing social science research methodology. Her work has been published in Social Forces, the Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, and Sociological Methodology.
Professor Simmons teaches classes such as Introduction to Sociology, Race and Crime, and Media and Politics. In 2020, she published two audiobooks designed for a lay audience: and .
