Mark Sawyer received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago in December of 1999. His dissertation was entitled "The Race Question: Racial Hierarchy and the State in Post Revolutionary Cuba." In October of 1999 he joined the faculty at UCLA in both African American Studies in Political Science where he is currently an Assistant Professor. Mark Sawyer is a comparativist who has serious interests in Black Political Thought, Critical Race theory, Post-Colonial theory, and theories of the state. His dissertation research centers on the power of the assumption of racial homogeneity in Marxist ideology and its impact on Cuban racial politics. He is also interested in issues of transnational identity and teaches a graduate seminar in "The Politics of the African Diaspora" that considers the salience of transnational identity in the black experience and its impact on Black ideological formation. He also teaches an undergraduate course in African American political thought which tracks both elite ideological discourse among African Americans and the presence of ideological structures in Black mass opinion and activism.
Current work includes a book manuscript entitled, "The Race Question: Racial Hierarchy and the State in Post Revolutionary Cuba", articles on the intersection between race and gender in modern Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic and additional work on the impact of race relations on democratic transition in Cuba. He has published in the Journal of Political Psychology as well as the UCLA Journal of International and Foreign Affairs. He is a member of the American Political Science Association, and the National Conference of Black Political Scientists
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