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Photograph of Marcelo Bohrt

Marcelo Bohrt Asst Professor School of International Service

Contact
Marcelo Bohrt
(202) 885-6701 (Office)
SIS - School of International Service
SIS - 249
In Fall 2022:
Mondays 2:30 - 3:30pm
Wednesdays 3:30 - 5:30pm
by appointment only
Please email me for other meeting times.
Additional Positions at AU
Faculty Affiliate, Antiracist Research & Policy Center
Faculty Affiliate, Center for Latin American & Latino Studies
Degrees
PhD in Sociology, Brown University
MA in Sociology, Brown University
BA in Sociology, The University of Texas at Austin

Languages Spoken
Spanish, English, Italian
Book Currently Reading
Dusk of Dawn by W.E.B. Du Bois
Bio
Marcelo Bohrt is a sociologist interested in racial politics and statecraft in the Americas. His primary area of research investigates the role of racial ideas and racial politics in the making and transformation of state bureaucracies. He is particularly interested in how colonial categories of race have been inscribed in state bureaucratic structures and practices, as well as how state agents (re)articulate ethnoracial boundaries within bureaucratic spaces. He is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled Decolonizing Diplomats: Race, State and the Struggle over Diplomatic Practice in Bolivia, which draws on participant observation in Bolivia’s Foreign Ministry, interviews with current and former state bureaucrats, and primary documents.

In an additional line of research, he adopts quantitative methods to examine how race and class shape the political and socioeconomic trajectories of immigrants and their children in the United States.

Marcelo Bohrt’s research has received support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship Program (IGERT), the NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (DDRIG), and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF).
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Scholarly, Creative & Professional Activities

Selected Publications

Bohrt, M. A. Forthcoming. “Race and the Diplomatic Bureaucracy: State-Building in Nineteenth-Century Bolivia as a Response to Transnational Racialization Threats.” Political Power and Social Theory. 

Bohrt, M. A., Graizbord, D., Heller, P. 2020. “Toward a Spatial Measure of Twenty-First-Century Developmental State Capacity.” Sociology of Development 6(2):250–74. https://doi.org/10.1525/sod.2020.6.2.250

Bohrt, M. A. 2020. “Racial Ideologies, State Bureaucracy, and Decolonization in Bolivia.” Bolivian Studies Journal/Revista de Estudios Bolivianos 25:7–28. https://doi.org/10.5195/bsj.2019.200

Bohrt, M.A. and J. Itzigsohn. 2015. “Class, Race, and the Incorporation of Latinos/as: Testing the Stratified Ethnoracial Incorporation Approach.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1(3):360-77. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649215570760