Dr. Pittman is an Associate Professor in the American Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Washington (UW). She received her Ph.D. in Sociology at Northwestern University. Before coming to the UW, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Poverty Research at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Georgia State University. In 2011, she completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Research and Training Program on Poverty and Public Policy at the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Dr. Pittman is currently focused on three distinct, but interrelated aspects of grandparent caregiving. Her forthcoming book, Grandmothering While Black: A Twenty-First Century Story of Love, Coercion and Survival will be published with the University of California Press (May 2023). She was awarded a Simpson Center Society of Scholars Fellowship, Royalty Research Fund, and a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship for junior faculty to complete her second book manuscript, tentatively titled I’m Not Going to Always Be Here: Black Grandmothering from Slavery through the Great Migration. Her scholarship has been published in numerous peer-reviewed academic journals and edited volumes. She is also working on a project that examines and intervenes on the health disparities experienced by grandparent caregivers and uses social and biomedical science approaches. Several institutions have funded Dr. Pittman’s work, including the National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Northwestern University, Hiram College, and the UW.
Broadly, Dr. Pittman’s research examines the coping experiences of socially marginalized women. Her other research interests include social stratification and inequality; urban poverty; race and ethnicity; gender and families; research methods; public policy; and health disparities.
