Save the Date
April 9, 2026, from 3:30-5:00 pm
Wallis Annenberg Conference Room, SSMS 4315
Bernadette Atuahene, Frances R. and John J. Duggan Professor of Law at the University of Southern California, in conversation with Melvin L. Oliver, President Emeritus of Pitzer College and Professor Emeritus of Sociology at UC Santa Barbara.
Please join us for a special conversation featuring Bernadette Atuahene, Frances R. and John J. Duggan Professor of Law at the University of Southern California and author of Plundered: How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America. She will be in conversation with Melvin L. Oliver, President Emeritus of Pitzer College and Professor Emeritus of Sociology at UC Santa Barbara. Additional details will be shared soon.
Bernadette Atuahene Frances R. and John J. Duggan Professor of Law, USC Gould School of Law
Bernadette Atuahene is a property law scholar whose work focuses on land theft and dispossession in the African Diaspora. The daughter of Ghanaian immigrants who grew up in Los Angeles, she earned her BA from UCLA, her JD from Yale, and an MPA from Harvard. After graduate school, she clerked at the Constitutional Court of South Africa and later worked as an associate at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton in New York. She is now a professor at the USC Gould School of Law. Atuahene has consulted for the World Bank and the South African Land Claims Commission and directed an award-winning documentary about a South African family’s struggle to reclaim their land. Her first book, We Want What’s Ours: Learning from South Africa’s Land Restitution Program (Oxford University Press, 2014), draws on 150 interviews with individuals dispossessed of land under colonial and apartheid regimes. She is also the recipient of a National Science Foundation award for her research on racialized property tax administration in Detroit, work that has received major recognition, including the Law and Society Association’s John Hope Franklin Award.
Melvin L. Oliver, President Emeritus, Pitzer College, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, UCSB
Melvin L. Oliver is president emeritus of Pitzer College, an award-winning scholar, and a leading expert on racial and urban inequality. Before joining Pitzer, he served at the University of California, Santa Barbara as executive dean of the College of Letters and Science, SAGE Sara Miller McCune Dean of Social Sciences, and professor of sociology, where he promoted faculty diversity and expanded access for underrepresented students. Earlier, he was vice president of the Asset Building and Community Development Program at the Ford Foundation, where he helped develop innovative initiatives including a $50 million program to expand homeownership for low-wealth households. Oliver previously taught sociology at UCLA, where he co-founded the Center for the Study of Urban Poverty and was named California Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation. He is the co-author of the award-winning book Black Wealth/White