Lecturers

Alex Manning:  Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies

Email Address: alex.manning@yale.edu

Alex Manning is a research scholar and lecturer, who teaches courses on racism, sports, families, and abolition. His  research explores the dynamic collisions among race/racism, families, youth, sport, and culture. He is currently  developing his dissertation, “Beyond Orange Slices: The Contested Terrain of Youth Soccer Culture in the United States”, into a book manuscript. In this project, he uses ethnography and interviewing to interrogate how  racism/race, class, gender, and cultural norms of parenting and youth development are experienced, embedded, and challenged in the  dynamic field of youth sport. His scholarship has been featured in journals and edited volumes such as the Du Bois Review, the Sociology of Race and Ethnicity,

Sociological Inquiry, Sociology Compass, European Journal of Sport and Society, Sociological Perspectives, and Child’s Play: Sport in Kids’ Worlds.

Federico Brandmayr: Lecturer of Political Science and Sociology

Email Address: federico.brandmayr@yale.edu

Federico Brandmayr’s work focuses on the politics of expertise—the contested production of expert knowledge and its reception and use by various groups, with an emphasis on knowledge about crime, terrorism, and political extremism. This focus forms the basis of his current book project. Federico also investigates the contemporary distrust of (social) scientific experts, particularly within the Italian context, and studies philosophical critiques of the role played by science and technology in modern societies. Additionally, he is interested in the history of the social sciences, the sociology of professions and intellectuals, and social and political theory. His articles have been published in Sociological Theory, Science, Technology, & Human Values, Social Epistemology, the European Journal of Sociology, the European Journal of Social Theory, and elsewhere. Federico holds degrees in political science and sociology from the University of Trieste, Italy, and Sorbonne University in Paris, and has conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge, the MacMillan Center at Yale, and LUISS University in Rome.

Mira Debs: Lecture, Sociology and Education Studies

Email Address: mira.debs@yale.edu

Mira Debs teaches and conducts research on comparative international education, alternative pedagogies, education policy, parent involvement, school choice, and school integration.

Research from her first book, Diverse Parents, Desirable Schools: Public Montessori in an Era of School Choice (Harvard Education Press, 2019) was featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Christian Science Monitor. She is the co-editor of the Handbook on Montessori Education (Bloomsbury 2023).

Other research examines how groups form collective identity through schooling, history and art. This including studies on school integration activism in Copenhagen, New York City, and Hartford, CT, and projects on the collective trauma resulting from the destruction of Italian art and India’s independence struggle. Her work has been published in Cultural Sociology, Nations and Nationalism, the American Journal of Education, Teachers College Record, the American Education Research Journal, Comparative Education, Research in Comparative and International Education,  and the Journal of Montessori Research. She has also written for the New York Times, Ed Week, and the Washington Post. Her research has been funded by the Spencer Foundation, the Brady Foundation and WEND Ventures.

At Yale, Mira Debs serves on the Advisory Committee for the Yale Prison Education Initiative and the Rhodes & Marshall Selection Committee. She has taught in a variety of spaces including high school, Wesleyan University, Yale-NUS, and a CT maximum security prison. She previously served as the director of the Yale Education Studies program from 2017 to 2025.   

 Angela Y. McClean: Lecturer in Sociology and East Asian Studies 

Email Address: angela.mcclean@yale.edu

Angela Yoonjeong McClean teaches courses on international and forced migration, human rights, and contemporary society in East Asia, with a particular focus on Korea. A sociologist by training, her research explores how global refugee protection frameworks are interpreted by national institutions and how these interpretations shape the lived experiences of asylum-seekers and migrants. Her current book project examines South Korea’s refugee status determination (RSD) process as a form of bureaucratic violence, arguing that rigid, security-oriented procedures displace asylum-seekers without physical movement, trapping them in cycles of waiting and precarity within national borders.

Her work has been published in International Political Sociology and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, as well as in public outlets such as The Conversation and 9Dashline. Her research has been supported by the Korea Foundation, the Academy of Korean Studies, and the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies (CCIS) at the University of California, San Diego.

Before joining Yale, she was an Assistant Professor at Indiana University - Bloomington, and previously held postdoctoral appointments at the University of Michigan and Yale. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from UC San Diego, her A.M. in Regional Studies–East Asia from Harvard University, and her B.A. in East Asian Studies and American Studies from Wellesley College.