Kimberley S. Johnson
Kimberley S. Johnson is a political scientist and urban studies scholar whose work examines governance, institutions, and the spatial organization of power in the United States. She is also a spatial storyteller, using history, maps, and urban form to interpret cities, suburbs, and metropolitan change.
Research Interests
American political development; urban politics; metropolitan governance; race and public policy; cities and suburbs; spatial history.
More About Kimberley Johnson:
Kimberley S. Johnson is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and an Associate Faculty Member in the Wilf Department of Politics and Wagner School of Public Policy. Her research centers on American political development, urban and local politics, and race and ethnic politics, with particular attention to the role of the administrative and intergovernmental state in producing and reshaping racial inequality. Johnson’s most recent book, Dark Concrete: Black Power Urbanism and the American Metropolis (Cornell University Press, 2025), analyzes the political development of Black power urbanism in U.S. cities. She is also the author of Governing the American State (Princeton University Press, 2007) and Reforming Jim Crow (Oxford University Press, 2010). Johnson’s current research examines race and the transformation of American state capacity, the institutional foundations of Black urban and suburban political life and governance, and metropolitan inequality in the post-neoliberal age. For more information, visit Johnson’s CV.
Kimberley S. Johnson 