Marion Orr - Department of Political Science, Brown University

This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.


Today's conversation is with Marion Orr (https://marionorr.com) , the inaugural Frederick Lippitt Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Political Science and Urban Studies at Brown University (https://polisci.brown.edu/people/mari...) . He previously was a member of the political science faculty at Duke University. Professor Orr earned his B.A. degree in political science from Savannah State College, M.A. in political science from Atlanta University (now Clark-Atlanta University), and a Ph.D. in Government and Politics from the University of Maryland, College Park. From 2008-2014, Professor Orr served as Director of the Alfred Taubman Center for Public Policy at Brown University. He is a former chair of Brown's Department of Political Science and a former director of Brown's Urban Studies Program. Professor Orr's expertise is in the area of American politics. He specializes in urban politics, race and ethnic politics, and African-American politics. He is the author and editor of eight books. His book, House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America's Most Consequential Black Congressman, Charles C. Diggs, Jr. (University of North Carolina Press, 2025), is the first biography of Michigan's first Black member of the U.S. House of Representatives.



Among Professor Orr's other books, Black Social Capital: The Politics of School Reform in Baltimore (University Press of Kansas), won the Policy Studies Organization's Aaron Wildavsky Award and his co-authored, The Color of School Reform: Race, Politics and the Challenge of Urban Education (Princeton University Press), was named the best book by the American Political Science Association's (APSA) Urban Politics Section. He is the coeditor (with Domingo Morel) of Latino Mayors: Political Change in the Postindustrial City. He is also the author of numerous scholarly articles, essays, and reviews.


In 2019, Professor Orr was awarded the APSA's Hanes Walton, Jr. Career Award that honors a political scientist whose lifetime of distinguished scholarship has made significant contributions to our understanding of racial and ethnic politics. Professor Orr is the recipient of Biographers International Organization Francis "Frank" Rollin Fellowship. He has also held a research fellowship at the Brookings Institution, a Presidential Fellowship from the University of California, Berkeley, and a fellowship from the Ford Foundation. Professor Orr served as President of the APSA's Organized Section on Urban Politics and as Chair of the Governing Board of the Urban Affairs Association (UAA), an international organization devoted to the study of urban issues. Dr. Orr has also served as a member of the executive councils of the American Political Science Association and the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. He has served, or is currently serving, on the editorial boards of the National Political Science Review, Journal of Urban Affairs, Journal of Race, Ethnicity and the City, and Urban Affairs Review.