Mo Torres
Mo Torres (MPP ‘15) is a Michigan Society of Fellows (MSF) postdoctoral scholar and assistant professor at the Ford School and in Sociology (LSA) for a three-year term. His research and teaching interests are in political economy, urban politics, and race-class inequality. His current book project explores the politics of fiscal crisis and urban austerity in Michigan from the 1970s to the present. Other projects include independent and collaborative work on neighborhood inequality, banking and payday lending, policing, and the sociology of race and racism. He will work closely with the Ford School’s Center for Racial Justice.
Torres received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University, where he was a Stone Fellow in the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy and a Doctoral Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Kennedy School. In 2019, he was a Fulbright scholar at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. A first-generation college graduate, he taught middle and high school in Detroit and worked in the K-12 non-profit sector before receiving his MPP from the Ford School.
Educational background
- PhD in sociology, Harvard University, 2023
- MPP, University of Michigan, 2015
- BA in history and Chicana/o Studies, UC Davis, 2010
Recent publications
- Mo Torres. “Against Race, Toward the Abolition of Racism.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. 2023. Publisher's Version
- Mario Small, Armin Akhavan, Mo Torres, and Qi Wang. “Banks, Alternative Institutions and the Spatial-Temporal Ecology of Racial Inequality in US Cities.” Nature Human Behavior. 2022. http://nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01153-1
