Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Ph.D.
Visiting Assistant Professor, Howard University

JESSICA GORDON NEMBHARD is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Economics Department’s Center for Race and Wealth at Howard University, and a visiting scholar at the Centre for the Study of Cooperatives at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada (academic year 2008-09).  Starting September 2009 she will join the faculty of John Jay College of the City University of New York (CUNY) as Associate Professor of Community Justice and Social Economic Development. She is a co-founder of The Democracy Collaborative at the University of Maryland (UMd), College Park. Dr. Gordon Nembhard is a political economist specializing in economic development policy, Black political economy, and popular economic literacy. Her research focuses on community- and asset- based economic development and democratic community economics, cooperative economics and worker ownership, alternative urban economic and educational development strategies, and racial wealth inequality and wealth accumulation in communities of color.

Dr. Gordon Nembhard’s recent publications include Wealth Accumulation and Communities of Color in the US: Current Issues (University of Michigan Press 2006, co-edited with Ngina Chiteji); “Alternative Economics, a Missing Component in the African American Studies Curriculum” (in a special issue co-edited by Gordon Nembhard and Mathew Forstater of the Journal of Black Studies, May 2008); “Growing Transformative Businesses: Community-Based Economic Development” (in the Solidarity Economy proceedings published by ChangeMaker Publications 2008). In addition, she is the author of ACooperatives and Wealth Accumulation@in the American Economic Review; ANon Traditional Analyses of Cooperative Economic Impacts,@ in the Review of International  Co-operation, ACooperative Ownership in the Struggle for African American Economic Empowerment@ in Humanity & Society, and “Educating Black Youth for Economic Empowerment: Democratic Economic Participation and School Reform Practices and Policies,” in Handbook of African American Education edited by Linda Tillman (Sage 2008). Dr. Gordon Nembhard is also completing a manuscript on the history of African American cooperative businesses.
 
Gordon Nembhard is the recipient of a Henry C. Welcome Fellowship Grant from the Maryland Higher Education Commission (2001-2004), and a USDA grant on the economic impact of cooperatives through the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Cooperatives to study wealth accumulation through cooperative ownership. She has been a member of the Black Enterprise Board of Economists since October 1999. Dr. Gordon Nembhard was a Visiting Scholar and Senior Urban Fellow at Brown University=s Annenberg Institute for School Reform from June 1998-June 2000. She is Treasurer of the National Economic Association (NEA). Jessica Gordon Nembhard earned a Ph.D. and an M.A. in economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1992 and 1989, respectively). She earned her B.A. degree, magna cum laude, in Literature and African American Studies from Yale University (1978); and an M.A.T. in Elementary Curriculum and Teaching from Howard University (1982).  She is the proud mother of two children (Stephen and Susan) and one grandson (Stephon).