I am an Associate Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles jointly appointed in the Department of African American Studies and the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics in the Division of Life Sciences. I am the author of the widely acclaimed Divine Variations and the founding director of the Biocritical Studies Lab--an interdisciplinary space committed to studying how discrimination, inequality, and resilience are embodied in human and nonhuman beings. I am currently working on a third book, Society after Nihilism: The Medicolegal Erasure of Accountability at the End of American Life. 
 
My teaching, research, and community engagement are concerned with the social, political, and ethical conditions that produce and abolish discrimination within our society.
[Photograph by Andreas Branch]
SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS
  • Structural Racism in Biomedical Research
    Link
    May 07, 12:30 PM – 2:00 PM
    Online Event
    UCLA, David Geffen School of Medicine
  • Race and Christianity Symposium with Denise Buell
    Apr 30, 7:00 PM
    Online Event
    Villanova University
  • Stanford University Lecture
    Apr 02, 7:00 PM
    Online Event
[Photograph by Rythum Vinoben]

DIVINE VARIATIONS

HOW  CHRISTIAN  THOUGHT BECAME  RACIAL  SCIENCE

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"Divine Variations brilliantly traces the roots of modern racial science to Christian intellectual history and ideology. Despite the efforts of genomic researchers to portray current biological concepts of race as purely scientific, Keel shows that these scientists are secular creationists retelling religious folklore about the origins of human life. This book is a crucial contribution to the history of racial science.
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-- Dorothy Roberts, author of Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century