I am a first-gen college student and child of Cambodian immigrants, and associate professor of Sociology and Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University. My full last name is Blume Oeur (pronounced BLUE-muh Or) with no hyphen. (Hear my name.) As a former public school teacher in Philadelphia, I first learned of and drew inspiration from W. E. B. Du Bois’s study The Philadelphia Negro. Twenty years later, I co-edited, with Zawadi Rucks-Ahidiana, a 2024 retrospective on the book in a special issue of City & Community.

I am foremost a lifelong student of the liberal arts. My research engages feminist and humanist insights to enrich a Sociology in the tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois, one committed to understanding the persistence of anti-Black racism today. (Please see my CV for links to publications.) This general compass is attuned to analyzing childhood in historical and contemporary contexts by overcoming presentist (the disregard of slavery’s ongoing legacies) and adultist (the disregard of young people as trivial topics of study) orientations in sociological practice. I have overlapping interests with gender and masculinity, education, sociological and feminist theory, and African American politics and intellectual history. My methodology is a Black feminist practice that bridges archival and qualitative methods, empirical data and fiction, and a caring ethic and political praxis.

In 2022 I was recognized with the Distinguished Early Career Award from the Children and Youth Section of the American Sociological Association. From 2017-2020 I served as co-chair for the Boston Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality. I am currently the Book Review Editor for Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. For a more detailed bio, please see my Tufts faculty profile.

Read more about my new volume with C. J. Pascoe, Gender Replay: On Kids, Schools, and Feminism, a tribute to and a critical reception of the work of the feminist scholar of childhood, Barrie Thorne.

I was recently the guest editor of a special issue of Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth (2021), titled “The Children of the Sun: Celebrating the One Hundred-Year Anniversary of The Brownies’ Book.” You can read more coverage on Tufts Now and access original issues of The Brownies’ Book at the website for the Library of Congress. My other recent writing includes co-editing a special issue on the study of colonialism and childhoods, illuminating a Du Boisian pedagogy guided by a positive notion of propaganda (you can listen to a podcast episode on the article), organizing a symposium in memory of the path-breaking sociologist Dorothy E. Smith, a meditation on academic book reviewing as a feminist art, and a reflection on “dialogues” as a decolonial methodology. I have forthcoming publications on topics including W. E. B. Du Bois’s methodology of historical fiction.

My current book manuscript, tentatively titled The Children of the Moon (under contract with UNC Press), uses a “shadow book” by W. E. B. Du Bois to meditate on Black childhood after slavery and how Du Bois and other Black authors and creatives have used the category of childhood to index Blackness as a site of desire, possibility, and futurity.

YOU CAN ORDER MY BOOK, Black Boys Apart: Racial Uplift and Respectability in All-Male Schools, at the University of Minnesota Press website or on Amazon. It has been recognized with multiple best book awards from the American Sociological Association.