Anastasia R. Mann

Stacy’s work focuses on a challenge the United States has been grappling with since its founding: to make good on the promise of multiracial democracy and achieve prosperity that is broadly shared by all who call the country home. In her teaching, organizing and institution building she has explored the ways that vested and elite interests have fought to contain the liberatory possibilities inherent in people and movements demanding justice and equity. 

Drawing on her training as an historian (Northwestern, PhD 2003), Stacy’s interests include reparations and transitional justice; community organizing and mutual aid; accessible, high-quality public services; tensions between social welfare and social control; access to quality higher education; and the politics and economics of kinship and recreation. 

Mann’s career has spanned academia (Northwestern, Princeton, Rutgers), research-driven nonprofits (the Russell Sage Foundation, New Jersey Policy Perspective), and the civic sphere (Princeton’s Human Services and Civil Rights Commissions, and the New Jersey Commission on New Americans). 

As Director of Rutgers University’s Program on Immigration and Democracy, Mann spearheaded Citizenship Rutgers, a tri-campus collaboration from the state’s flagship public research university, offering free citizenship application assistance to New Jersey’s almost 600,000 legal permanent residents. 

In March of 2020, Mann came together with a broad coalition of neighbors to establish Princeton Mutual Aid, a lively hub of political education, resource redistribution, and connection.

At Princeton University, she teaches courses on immigration policy and organizing as well as on “worldmaking,” ie popular movements to wrest opportunity and liberation from the ashes of domination and conflict, to disrupt historical trends and distribute human capability widely.

In 2022, under the leadership of Dean Amaney Jamal of Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, Stacy became Founding Director of SPIA in NJ, a place-based project that deploys the people and resources of Princeton University to advance innovative, practical, evidence-based research that supports state and local leaders addressing the issues that matter most to the communities they serve. With programs like the Garden State Fellowship and the Rutgers X Princeton Collaboratory, SPIA in NJ leverages the expertise and lived experience of the campus community in partnerships linking academic research to real-world applications, in turn, strengthening Princeton’s commitment to and understanding of democracy right in our own backyard.