Sociologist Mo Torres (MPP ‘15) will join the Ford School faculty for a three-year appointment as a postdoctoral scholar with the Michigan Society of Fellows, serving as an assistant professor of public policy and sociology. He will work closely with the Center for Racial Justice and teach periodically at the Ford School.
The fellows were chosen for the importance and quality of their scholarship and for their interest in interdisciplinary work. During their tenure at U-M, they will teach selected courses in their affiliated departments and continue their scholarly research.
Torres is coming to the Ford School from Harvard University, where he received his PhD and was a Stone Fellow in the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy at the Kennedy School.
His research and teaching interests are in political economy, urban sociology, inequality, and the sociology of race. His dissertation explores the politics of post-industrial decline and urban austerity in Michigan from the 1970s to the present, with a special emphasis on Detroit, Flint, and smaller cities like Benton Harbor, Highland Park, and Pontiac. Torres’s current work includes research on race-class stratification and financial institutions, police militarization, the sociology of W.E.B. Du Bois, and race theory.
At Harvard, Torres also worked as an undergraduate academic advisor and developed support and programming for students of color, queer students, and first-generation/low-income students. In 2019, he was a Fulbright scholar at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. Torres is a first-generation college graduate himself. Before graduate school, he taught middle and high school in Detroit and worked in the K-12 non-profit sector.