| Celeste Watkins-Hayes | |
| Occupation: | Public policy professor |
| Education: | Spelman College (BA) Harvard University (MA, PhD) |
| Notableworks: | Remaking a Life: How Women Living with HIV/AIDS Confront Inequality and The New Welfare Bureaucrats |
Celeste Watkins-Hayes is a public policy scholar and dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy of the University of Michigan.
Celeste Watkins-Hayes is the Interim Dean and the founding director of the Center for Racial Justice at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. [1] She holds a University Professorship in Diversity and Social Transformation, the Jean Fairfax Collegiate Professorship in the Ford School of Public Policy, and is a professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan.[2]
Prior to her arrival at the University of Michigan, Watkins-Hayes was a professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Northwestern University, a faculty fellow at Northwestern’s Institute for Policy Research, and an Associate Vice President for Research where she created the ASCEND faculty development initiative and oversaw several research centers and institutes.[3] Watkins-Hayes is a former chair of the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern.
In addition to her academic appointments, Watkins-Hayes also served on the board of trustees at Spelman College for over a decade, where she assumed various leadership roles and led the search to identify the college's 10th president.[4] She is a founding steering member of the Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums, having served on the board of directors of the Detroit Institute of Arts from 2017 to 2021.[5]
Watkins-Hayes holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Sociology from Harvard University. Her book, Remaking a Life: How Women Living with HIV/AIDS Confront Inequality, analyzes the transformation of the AIDS epidemic.[6] In addition to her academic articles and essays, Watkins-Hayes has published pieces in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Chicago Magazine.
Watkins-Hayes's research focuses on urban poverty; social policy; HIV/AIDS; non-profit and government organizations; and race, class, and gender. Her first book is The New Welfare Bureaucrats: Entanglements of Race, Class, and Policy Reform (University of Chicago Press, 2009).[7]
Watkins-Hayes is currently principal investigator of the Health, Hardship, and Renewal Study. Her second book, Remaking a Life: How Women Living with HIV/AIDS Confront Inequality, was published by the University of California Press (August 2019).[8]