Orly Clergé is Associate Professor of Sociology at UC-Davis and her research focuses on race and racism, migration & immigration, cities, and culture. She is the award-winning author of the book The New Noir: Race, Identity & Diaspora in Black Suburbia (University of California Press, 2019). The New Noir explores the Black identities of middle-class American, Haitian, and Jamaican suburbanites. The book contributes to understandings of how nationality, race, and “making it” are culturally negotiated by a diverse and shrinking Black middle class during the Great Recession.

The New Noir delves into the historical and contemporary complexity of Blackness in suburbs, places originally designed to be “for whites only.” The book won the prestigious Mary Douglas Best Book Prize in the American Sociological Association’s Culture Section, and was named a finalist for one of the most coveted awards in the social sciences, the C. Wright Mills Award. To hear more about the book, Orly was interviewed by the New Books Network podcast. The New Noir is the first book in a two-book series on the politics of Black identity in the 21st century. Orly is currently crafting Young World: The Retrospective Political Futures of Black Millennials (under contract with University of California Press), which analyzes Black millennials’ racialized transitions to adulthood during during the Obama, Trump, and Biden Presidencies.

Orly also co-edited the book Stories from the Front of the Room: How Higher Education Faculty of Color Survive & Thrive in the Academy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017) which uncovers the racial exclusions underrepresented faculty face at historically White colleges and universities and their strategies of resistance and success. The book informed debates on the toll of racism on college campuses during #blackintheivory hashtag activism on Twitter. Orly also is co-editing The Pipeline is Broken (University Press at Colorado), a volume on how marginalized graduate students negotiate racism in graduate education. Orly’s other writings have appeared in Ethnic & Racial Studies, Race, Ethnicity, and Education, The Russell Sage Foundation Journal, The New Black Sociologist, Sociology Compass, and Population, Space and Place. Orly is a public scholar, and has been featured in outlets such as Zora Magazine and The Boston Globe.

Orly’s body of research and political work is influenced by a key motivation: to decolonize social theories of race, culture, and immigration by centering how everyday individuals and families of color interpret, construct and challenge the inequities of white supremacy, class inequality and gender oppression they face in their schools and neighborhoods.

Orly’s work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Orly earned her Ph.D. from Brown University in Sociology and Social Demography. She is a Fellow at the Urban Ethnography Project at Yale University, Co-Chaired the Society for the Study of Social Problems’ (SSSP) Division of Racial and Ethnic Minorities 2018-2020 (DREM) and is a member of the Black Women Organized for Political Action (BWOPA) Sacramento chapter. Orly has also previously worked as the Managing Editor of the American Sociological Association’s urban journal, City & Community, was a NYU Fellow for Emerging Leaders in Public Service and a research assistant at the Russell Sage Foundation. Orly resides in Sacramento. She is on sabbatical and is a Visiting Scholar at NYU during Fall 2022.