Dr. Pittman is an Associate Professor of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. She is the Joff Hanauer Honors Professor in Western Civilization and has an appointment in the Department of Sociology. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology at Northwestern University. Before coming to the University of Washington, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Poverty Research at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Georgia State University. In 2011, she completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Research and Training Program on Poverty and Public Policy at the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 

Dr. Pittman is currently focused on three distinct, but interrelated aspects of grandparent caregiving. Her book, Grandmothering While Black: A Twenty-First Century Story of Love, Coercion and Survival explores the complex lives of Black grandmothers raising their grandchildren in skipped-generation households. Prioritizing the voices of Black grandmothers through in-depth interviews and ethnographic research at various sites, Dr. Pittman showcases a fundamental change in the relationship between grandmother and grandchild as grandmothers confront the paradox of fulfilling the social and legal functions of motherhood without the legal rights of the role. This compelling work illuminates the strategies used by grandmothers to manage their legal marginalization vis-à-vis parents and the state across a range of caregiving arrangements. In doing so, it reveals the overwhelming and painful decisions Black grandmothers must make to ensure the safety and well-being of the next generation.

Dr. Pittman was awarded a Simpson Center Society of Scholars Fellowship, Royalty Research Fund, and a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship for junior faculty to complete her second book manuscript, tentatively titled I’m Not Going to Always Be Here: Black Grandmothering from Slavery through the Great Migration. Her scholarship has been published in diverse venues, including Health Equity, The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Social Science and Medicine, City and Community, and Women, Gender, and Families of Color. Her research on grandparent caregiving and African American families has also been featured in the following edited volumes: Mothering and Black Lives Matter, Relational Poverty Politics!, Health Care for People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Across the Lifespan, and The African American Experience: Psychoanalytic Perspectives. Several institutions have funded Dr. Pittman’s work, including the National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Northwestern University, Hiram College, and the University of Washington. She is also working on a project that examines and intervenes on the health disparities experienced by grandparent caregivers and uses social and biomedical science approaches.

Broadly, Dr. Pittman’s research focuses on the coping experiences of socially marginalized women, including Black women living raising a second and third generation and those living with poor health outcomes. Her other research interests include social stratification and inequality; urban poverty; race and ethnicity; gender and families; research methods; public policy; and health disparities. She is the founder and director of the black digital humanities project—Real Black Grandmothers.

Dr. Pittman is a certified yoga and mindfulness meditation teacher and teaches mindfulness meditation classes to kinship caregivers (and others). In 2022, she was inducted into the Mind and Life Institute Fellow Program where she will “engage and collaborate with a global network of influential leaders committed to contemplative scholarship and practice.”