Nora Gross is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Sociology and a Boston College Core Fellow. She received her PhD in 2020 from the University of Pennsylvania in Sociology and Education (dual degree), where she was a Harry Frank Guggenheim Dissertation Fellow. Nora’s research examines educational inequality with a focus on race, gender, and emotion in secondary school contexts.

Nora is currently working on a book manuscript with the University of Chicago Press based on her dissertation research: an ethnographic study of the role of grief in the school lives of Black adolescent boys who lose friends to neighborhood gun violence, and the school practices and policies that shape their emotional and educational recovery. A secondary project explores the way white students in elite private high schools experience their schools’ diversity and inclusion efforts, as well as the affective political polarization of their schools. Nora is also committed to interrogating and improving the way we do research with youth and recently co-edited a book, Care-Based Methodologies: Reimagining Qualitative Research with Youth in US Schools (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2022). 

Nora is also a documentary filmmaker and has worked on both feature-length films and shorts. Her first feature, Making Sweet Tea, tells stories of Black gay men in the South and asks viewers to think about the role of performance in sharing others’ stories. She also recently collaborated with youth on two short films related to her research on gun violence and grief. Both can be found at http://www.noragross.com/gun-violence-grief. 

Before her PhD, Nora was a high school teacher in Chicago and earned a Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies from the New School, an M.A. in Sociology of Education from NYU, and a B.A. in Art History and African American Studies from Princeton University.