Dr. Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman is a 4th generation native of Tampa and Associate Professor of Sociology and Center for African & African American Studies at Rice University. She received her B.A. from Cornell University and her M.A. & Ph.D. in Sociology from Duke University. Dr. Hordge-Freeman published her first book, The Color of Love: Racial Features, Stigma, and Socialization in Black Brazilian Families (The University of Texas Press) in 2015. This book was awarded the American Sociological Association (ASA) Section on Emotions Book Award, ASA Body and Embodiment Best Publication Award, and the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interactionism Charles Horton Cooley Book Award. In 2015, she presented a TEDxUSF talk on The Color of Love and the book was translated into Portuguese in April 2018. She has published widely including journal articles in the Journal of Marriage and Family, Qualitative Research, and Ethnic & Racial Studies, several book chapters, and published a co-edited volume with Gladys Mitchell-Walthour entitled, Race and the Politics of Knowledge Production: Diaspora and Black Transnational Scholarship in the US and Brazil (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Hordge-Freeman has been awarded several grants and fellowships to support her research, including a Ford Dissertation Fellowship, Fulbright grant, American Sociological Association Minority Fellowship, McKnight Fellowship, Ruth Landes Memorial Research Grant, and WLP Junior Faculty Research Award. In 2022, Hordge-Freeman published, Second-Class Daughters: Black Brazilian Women and Informal Adoption as Modern Slavery (Cambridge University, Press), which was awarded the 2023 Distinguished Scholarship Award from the Section of Race, Gender, and Class of the American Sociological Association. Dr. Hordge-Freeman teaches courses on Racial & Ethnic Studies, Comparative Racial Stratification, Sociology of Families, and Race, Gender and Labor in Brazil/Latin America. Her community-engaged teaching, including her creation of the USF in Bahia, Brazil has been recognized with awards from regional, state, and national levels.
In 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, Dr. Hordge-Freeman sent a Call to Action letter endorsed by over 100 USF Black employees at USF to signal the group’s solidarity with USF Black faculty, staff and students who were experiencing the ravages of both COVID-19 and to recommend how the university should move forward. She ultimately assembled and convened the Black Employee Steering Committee and was appointed the inaugural Senior Advisor to the President and Provost for Diversity and Inclusion to lead the Anti-Racism Initiative at the University of South Florida (2020-2022). She later served as Interim Vice President of Institutional Equity and Interim Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Recruitment, Retention and Engagement. In these roles, she conceptualized the innovative Diversity, Anti-Racism and Equity Dashboards, organized inaugural calling campaigns for Black students, coordinated a bilingual calling campaign for Latino students, and facilitated the establishment of new Presidential Advisory Councils for Asian students and for Accessibility. She is the co-creator and co-chair of the Advancing Latino Access and Success Presidential Taskforce, which provides recommendations and strategies to university leadership to support its advancement to becoming a Hispanic-serving institution. As a result of these efforts, USF received the 2022 Higher Education Excellence in Diversity Award, and she received personal recognition from the City of Tampa Black History Committee and the Tampa Hispanic Heritage Inc.
Most recently, she launched a new interdisciplinary collaboration on Instagram with her husband, McArthur Freeman, entitled, Imagine Blackness AI, which brings together artificial intelligence, art, and sociology to produce images that are inspired by speculative fiction and Afro-Futurism. For more on this creative project, visit here.
