Chinyere Agbai

Chinyere Agbai is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Sociology at The Ohio State University, and she will begin her appointment as an assistant professor in the department in 2023. Her research seeks to uncover the roots of the racial wealth gap in homeownership and explore their consequences for racial inequality in wealth and health. Her dissertation explores the historical roots of the contemporary racial wealth gap through the lens of one of the largest housing policies in American history: the GI Bill of 1944. It then interrogates the consequences of massive wealth inequality for mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic. One ongoing project examines the intergenerational effects of the housing benefits of the 1944 GI Bill on racial inequality in housing wealth among the descendants of World War II veterans. She earned a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Brown University.