David Varel is a postdoctoral fellow in African-American studies at Case Western Reserve University. a historian of the modern United States who specializes in intellectual history, African American history, the history of race and class, and the civil rights movement. His research examines the social construction of race, paying special attention to the role of black intellectuals in combating scientific racism during the first half of the 20th century. His current book manuscript, The Lost Black Scholar: Resurrecting Allison Davis in American Social Thought, 1902-1983, is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press.