She is a Racial Policy Scholar and a Fulbright Specialist in Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Politics, Director of The Think Tank at The Thinkubator, Director of Programs Community Relations at Citizens Committee for New York City and a Scholar with Scholars Strategy Network, and teaches in the Executive Leadership doctoral program with Saint John Fisher College. Dr. Branch has a Ph.D. and an M. Phil from Milano School of International Affairs, Management, and Urban Policy as well as an MA in Political Science from the New School of Social Research. She completed her BA in Political Science at Fordham University.

Her scholarship and practice examine the gulf between Black optimism about group progress and the actual data on continuing disparities, questions of social knowledge, social beliefs and relative group position through the transformative application of rhetorical criticism to interrogate narratives that structure social practices in ways that privilege some and marginalize others. She is the author of Optimism At All Costs: Black Attitudes, Activism, and Advancement in Obama’s America with University of Massachusetts Press.

She has appeared in the New York Times, Center for Public Integrity, and Women’s Wear Daily. She’s written for Blavity, Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric, Scholars Strategy Network, Racism Review, and Diverse Issues in Higher Education.