Mark Sawyer, a professor of political science and a professor of African American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, died late last month in Los Angeles. He was 45 years old.
Dr. Sawyer was a native of Chicago. He was a graduate of the University of Illinois and earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in political science at the University of Chicago.
After serving as a lecturer at San Francisco State University, Dr. Sawyer joined the faculty at UCLA in 1999 as an assistant professor. He also served as the director of the university’s Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics and was instrumental in transforming the African American studies program into an academic department at the university. Dr. Sawyer was the author of Racial Politics in Post-Revolutionary Cuba (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
