Louise Seamster will be presenting the first visiting lecture for a new graduate workshop: Risk, Lending, & the Future of Debtor Urbanization. Seamster is a postdoctoral teaching associate in Sociology at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. She earned her PhD in Sociology at Duke University, an MA in Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research, and a BA at Vassar College. She writes about racial politics and urban development, emergency financial management, debt, and the myth of racial progress. Her research centers on the interactive financial and symbolic factors reproducing racial inequality across multiple domains. She has published work in Contexts, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Currents, and Sociology Compass, and has work forthcoming in Sociological Theory and Du Bois Review. She has also co-edited five special issues on race, politics and inequality in Political Power and Social Theory, Critical Sociology, Humanity and Society, and American Behavioral Scientist.