Darnell Hunt

Darnell Montez Hunt (born 1962) is an American sociologist and academic administrator. He is a professor of sociology and African American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles and the former director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies. Hunt previously served as interim chancellor of UCLA from August to December 2024.

Education Hunt received a Bachelor of Arts with a major in journalism (public relations) from the University of Southern California in 1984 and a Master of Business Administration from Georgetown University in 1988. He received a Master of Arts in 1991 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1994 in sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Career He later became a full professor of Sociology and African American Studies. The 2017 report, which was commissioned by the Color of Change, a non-profit civil rights advocacy organization, showed that very few television writers were black. To increase their share, Hunt suggested television producers use the Rooney Rule during their interviewing process. However, in a review for the Revue française de sociologie, Julien Damon regretted that Hunt did not look at the way Koreans were impacted by the riots; he added that other axes of subjectivity than race like "age, sex, profession and income levels" would have made the analysis more comprehensive. His second book, O.J. Simpson Facts and Fictions: News Rituals in the Construction of Reality, is about the O. J. Simpson murder case.

Hunt subsequently edited two books. His third book, Channeling Blackness: Studies on Television and Race in America, was about the way blacks are portrayed on television. His fourth book, Black Los Angeles: American Dreams and Racial Realities, co-edited with Ana-Christina Ramón, the assistant director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, is a collection of seventeen articles about South Los Angeles and Leimert Park. The Journal of American History published a mixed review by Lawrence B. de Graaf, a History professor at California State University, Fullerton. For de Graaf, "This book should be in any collection on recent African American life and on Los Angeles, but next to more comprehensive historical works." In particular, he criticized the lack of attention paid to blacks who live just outside Los Angeles, or to the black middle class. Reviewing it for The Journal of African American History, John H. Barnhill praised the book, writing "Scholarly excellence characterizes many of the articles." He concluded, "the volume provides a great deal of direction for those seeking to understand the background to and current state of the African American urban experience in the 21st century."

Published works