After receiving her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, Karen V. Hansen joined the faculty at Brandeis University and for thirty-five years taught courses on social inequality, immigration, families, and historical sociology to hundreds of students. Her new book, Working-Class Kids and Visionary Educators in a Multiracial School: A Story of Belonging, explores how principals and teachers sought ways to cultivate youth development, peer helping, and student leadership. Through oral histories and archival research about Sunnyvale High, the school she attended, Hansen assesses what made it such an effective learning environment.

The author of four books and numerous scholarly articles, and the editor of three anthologies, Hansen has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship; a Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies, at Uppsala University, Sweden; an Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellowship in the Humanities, Harvard University; and conferred with an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Southern Denmark.