Search Fellows | Russell Sage Foundation

Rich Benjamin

Visiting Journalist

Rich Benjamin is the author of Searching for Whitopia and a contributing writer to The New Yorker. He is working on a book, The White People Deadline: Race, Threat, and the Next America, that investigates how racial divides and white decline, both real and perceived, shape national concerns. He will show how seemingly race-neutral issues such as gun control and the social safety net are defined by racial anxiety over perceived white decline.

Carole Carmichael

Visiting Journalist

Carole Carmichael is Assistant Managing Editor at The Seattle Times and a member of numerous journalism organizations, including the National Association of Black Journalists, the Associated Press Media Editors and the Pulitzer Prize Nominating Jury. At the foundation, Carmichael investigated the outcomes of black and Hispanic recipients of a 1968 scholarship to New York University, tracing how this educational opportunity affected the recipients’ economic and social capital over more than four decades.

Sarah Carr

Visiting Journalist

Sarah Carr is O’Brien Fellow in Public Service Journalism at Marquette University, an independent journalist, and editor at the Hechinger Report. As an RSF visiting journalist, Carr will write a book following a diverse set of families as they attempt to help their children become literate, examining the ways in which race and ethnicity, as well as immigration and socioeconomic status, shape their capacity to access the supports and tools their children need to learn to read.

Andrea Elliott

The New York Times

Visiting Journalist

Andrea Elliott is an investigative reporter at the New York Times. At the foundation she worked on a book examining one family’s survival in an era of gentrification, rising inequality and the advent of social media. The book builds on her 2013 five-part Times story, “Invisible Child.”

Cara Fitzpatrick

Visiting Journalist

Cara Fitzpatrick is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a current Spencer Fellow. She will work on a historical account that investigates the people, unusual political alliances, and big money interests that have shaped the rise of school vouchers over the last 60 years. She will also explore whether the rise of school vouchers has deepened segregation and inequality or helped low-income minority children get better access to quality schools.

Nikole Hannah-Jones

Visiting Journalist

Nikole Hannah-Jones is a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine and the recipient of a 2017 MacArthur Foundation fellowship. At RSF she is working on a book about school segregation that spans the founding of common schools to the present-day educational landscape and argues that public schools in the U.S. are not broken but operating as designed.

Sylvia A. Harvey

Visiting Journalist

Sylvia A. Harvey, an independent journalist, is writing a book, The Shadow System, which investigates the impact of mass incarceration on families. Through in-depth reporting focused on three affected families, she will review the collateral consequences that a family member’s incarceration has on the lives of children, partners, and other relatives. She will also show how social institutions, such as different aspects of the criminal justice, child welfare, and education systems, shape the lives of family members.

Clara Hemphill

Visiting Journalist

Clara Hemphill is an independent journalist and the founding editor of InsideSchools.org, a free online guide to New York City public schools sponsored by The New School's Center for New York City Affairs. As an RSF visiting journalist, Hemphill will write a book that examines why school segregation is so persistent, even in racially integrated neighborhoods.

Jude Joffe-Block

Visiting Journalist

Jude Joffe-Block, an independent journalist, is co-authoring a book that explores how Arizona came to be bitterly divided over immigration in the mid 2000s, anticipating the nation's current polarization. The book chronicles how former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio transformed into a zealous immigration enforcer, how a grassroots movement advocating for Latino and immigrant rights organized in the streets and in the courts to stop Arpaio’s unconstitutional tactics, and how the fight over immigration and civil rights in Arizona became a national battle under Trump.

Larissa MacFarquhar

Visiting Journalist

Larissa MacFarquhar is a staff writer for The New Yorker. She will study pairs of siblings from three American families in which one sibling chose to move away from his or her hometown, and the other chose to stay. Her book will follow their lives, tracing the way that their original decisions bound them to, or led them away from, the places where they started. She will also explore how these siblings’ separations shaped their values, class, and politics both in their later years and for subsequent generations.

Tracie McMillan

Visiting Journalist

Tracie McMillan is an independent investigative journalist. While at the foundation, she will research and write The White Bonus, a work of investigative memoir and narrative journalism that uses social science to quantify the cash value of whiteness. Alternating between narratives of three generations of her white, working class family and single-chapter profiles of five other white Americans, her project links individual genealogies of wealth and opportunity to history, social science, and public policy.

Alexis Okeowo

The New Yorker

Visiting Journalist

Alexis Okeowo is on hiatus from The New Yorker. She will work on a book that goes beyond the black-white divide to explore the nuances and complexities of race, gender, class, immigration status, and political power in Alabama, a state that she argues has been the most prominent stage for the best and the worst results of the American experiment.

Mary Otto

Independent Journalist

Visiting Journalist

Otto is an independent journalist working on a monograph (New Press, under contract) about health care in Central Appalachia. The region faces some of the most formidable health care challenges in America. There are grave shortages of doctors, dentists, and mental health providers.

Eyal Press

Visiting Journalist

Press is a recipient of the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, and has contributed to the New Yorker, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books and numerous other publications. At the foundation he worked on a book exploring “society’s most thankless, morally compromising jobs,” including immigrants working in meatpacking plants, maximum-security prison guards, and military drone operators.

Julia Preston

Marshall Project

Visiting Journalist

Preston is a journalist for the Marshall Project. She is working on a book project entitled Here to Stay: Young Immigrants Fight for their Place in America. This is a narrative history of the movement of undocumented young people known as Dreamers and the gains they achieved for the civil rights of a generation of immigrants in the United States.

Mosi Secret

Visiting Journalist

Mosi Secret is an independent journalist based in Brooklyn. While at the foundation, he will write a book, A Narrative History of the Desegregation of Southern Boarding Schools, 1967-1975, that examines the long-term outcomes of a social experiment. In the late 1960s, 140 talented black and brown boys and girls were recruited to integrate all-white, Southern boarding schools, to address the extent to which such integration might make white children less bigoted by exposing them to black scholarship students.

Melissa Segura

Visiting Journalist

Melissa Segura is an investigative reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New Mexico.

Alexandra Starr

Visiting Journalist

Alexandra Starr is a contributor to NPR, Harpers, the Atlantic, the New York Times, and other outlets. At the foundation she studied the challenges of family reunification—or when children immigrate to join their parents who left them behind to find work in the U.S.—focusing on the experiences of both children and adults in reunited Honduran families in the Bronx.

Louise Story

Visiting Journalist

Louise Story is an independent journalist. As an RSF visiting journalist, Story will research and write about the history of the racial wealth gap, with a special focus on Black Americans. Her project (in partnership with journalist Ebony Reed) will focus on contemporary Black millennials who are trying to increase their families' wealth. Story will examine how these families' histories - as well as the history of the racial wealth gap - inform their lives today.

Anna Louie Sussman

Visiting Journalist

Anna Louie Sussman is an independent journalist. As an RSF visiting journalist, Sussman will work on a book about how many features of our current version of capitalism have become inimical to human reproduction and family life. It explores how such aspects of our contemporary economic and social system – high and growing inequality, environmental destruction and toxic exposure, the financialization of everything, and the seeming abundance of choice and opportunity – affect whether and how we can create the families we desire.