Daniel HoSang
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Daniel Martinez HoSang is Professor of American Studies at Yale University, with secondary appointments in the Department of Political Science and the Section of the History of Medicine at Yale School of Medicine. He is Director of Graduate Studies for the American Studies Program and a Faculty Affiliate of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies.
HoSang is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research examines race, democracy, political transformation, and the changing landscape of American conservatism. His recent work explores the emergence of the multiracial right, the erosion of institutional trust, and the ways contemporary political movements build community, identity, and belonging in an era of widespread social and political disillusionment.
A second major area of HoSang’s research examines the history and contemporary legacies of eugenics, scientific racism, and racial formation. He leads collaborative research through the Anti-Eugenics Collective at Yale, investigating the history and afterlives of eugenics research at Yale and its continuing influence on medicine, public health, and the life sciences.
In 2024, he was named a Freedom Scholar by the Marguerite Casey Foundation in recognition of his contributions to scholarship and public engagement, and in 2026 was recognized as an Andrew Carnegie Fellow for his new book project The Cynical Style in American Politics. From 2023 to 2025 he was a Race and Democracy Fellow for the Roosevelt Institute.
His forthcoming book, What the Left Gets Wrong About the Right (Haymarket Books, 2027), challenges conventional explanations for the contemporary right’s expansion. Drawing on more than a decade of field research at conservative political gatherings, community organizations, and media networks, the book argues that the growth of the right cannot be understood solely through frameworks of authoritarianism, misinformation, or demographic backlash. Instead, it examines how conservative movements cultivate political belonging and community amid declining trust in institutions, while offering a new framework for understanding democratic transformation and rebuilding collective life.
HoSang is co-editor, with Joseph Lowndes, of The Politics of the Multiracial Right (NYU Press, 2027), an interdisciplinary collection examining the emergence of racially diverse conservative coalitions in the United States and internationally. His public scholarship on race, democracy, higher education, and contemporary political movements has appeared in The New York Times, TIME, The Guardian, The American Prospect, The Public Eye, and The Conversation.
HoSang is the author of A Wider Type of Freedom: How Struggles for Racial Justice Liberate Everyone (University of California Press, 2021); Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity (with Joseph Lowndes, University of Minnesota Press, 2019); and Racial Propositions: Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California (University of California Press, 2010), which received the James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians. He has also co-edited Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness Across the Disciplines (2019), Relational Formations of Race (2019), and Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century (2012).
He is the Founding Director of the Center for Applied Research on Democracy (CARD), an interdisciplinary research center examining the lived experiences of politics that shape the conditions for democratic governance.
Beyond his academic scholarship, HoSang has worked extensively with labor unions, community organizations, educators, and civic institutions on research, leadership development, and democratic participation. Through the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute and the Anti-Racist Teaching & Learning Collective, he has collaborated with K–12 educators to develop curricula on race, democracy, and social justice. He has also taught and presented within the Yale Prison Education Initiative.
Prior to joining Yale in 2017, HoSang was Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and Political Science at the University of Oregon. He received his BA in History from Wesleyan University and his PhD in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California. At Yale he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on race, democracy, political transformation, and histories of eugenics scientific racism and advises doctoral students across the humanities and social sciences.