Boston — Dianne M. Pinderhughes, president of the American Political Science Association, promised to keep her presidential address brief on Thursday night at the group’s annual conference. She knew that her colleagues would not be amused if her session ran long and prevented them from hearing Sen. Barack Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention.

She kept her word. In a 40-minute talk, Ms. Pinderhughes, who is a professor of political science and Africana studies at the University of Notre Dame and is the first African-American woman to lead the association, made a plea for more-sophisticated scholarship about race and politics.

She began by evoking her early years in Washington, D.C. “I attended an elementary school, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, that was situated at the top of a hill,” she said. “I looked down every day on official post-World War II Washington: the Capitol, the Pentagon, the Washington Monument. It was a city that was just beginning to come out from the segregation of the previous five or six decades.”

It was almost unimaginable at that time, Ms. Pinderhughes said, that an African-American might win a major party’s presidential nomination. And as recently as a year ago, she and many of her colleagues failed to predict that Mr. Obama’s campaign would succeed — an error that she likened to the discipline’s failure to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The failure to foresee the possibility of Mr. Obama’s success, Ms. Pinderhughes said, was just one small symptom of the discipline’s general failure to develop serious models of the politics of race. “We must begin to consider race in a complex way,” she said, “in the same way that we consider the Founding, international relations, and constitutional law. We’re facing a profound change in American public life without the theoretical tools that we need to explain it.”

An hour after Ms. Pinderhughes finished, a crowd of nearly 200 political scientists gathered in a conference room to watch Mr. Obama’s speech on a large screen. The applause was long and loud — more evidence, if any were needed, that Mr. Obama is popular among academics. Even if some of the scholars had failed to predict Mr. Obama’s rise, that did not stop them from appreciating his work last night.

(Question for extra credit: If Mr. Obama becomes president, will his skills as an orator undermine the thesis of this paper, which was presented at the conference on Thursday?)