Nora Gross

Nora Gross is a sociologist of education, an ethnographer, and a documentary filmmaker. Her research explores the intersection of race, gender, and class for youth in school and community contexts and asks how young people develop and protect their inner lives in the face of considerable external constraints.

In her ethnographic book, Brothers in Grief: The Hidden Toll of Gun Violence on Black Boys and Their Schools (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Gross spotlights the emotional impacts of neighborhood gun violence for Black teenage boys and its consequences for educational equity. The books tells the story of a Philadelphia high school and the evolving ways that students and school staff negotiated grief and academic expectations in the aftermath of student deaths.

Gross also co-edited a methods text entitled Care-Based Methodologies: Reimagining Qualitative Research with Youth in U.S. Schools (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2022), which offers concrete advice for conducting school-based research grounded in care. Other work has been published in education, sociology, and social science methods journals and several documentary films are available for public viewing.

Prior to coming to Barnard in 2023, Gross was a Core Fellow/Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boston College where she worked on interdisciplinary teaching teams in the freshman core curriculum. She received her PhD in 2020 from the University of Pennsylvania in Sociology and Education, an MA in Sociology of Education from NYU, a Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies from The New School, and a BA in Art History and African American Studies from Princeton University. Gross was also the founding director of a high school writing center on the West Side of Chicago.