Allyson Hobbs holds a bachelor's degree from Harvard and a doctorate from the University of Chicago, and teaches American and African American history at Stanford. She has held fellowships from the Ford Foundation and Stanford's Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and teaches courses on American identity, African American history, African American women's history and 20thcentury American history. Hobbs has won numerous teaching awards, including the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize. Her first book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, examines the phenomenon of racial passing in the United States from the late 18th century to the present, and will be published by Harvard University Press in the fall of 2014.

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