Faculty Affiliates

Maria E. Hamilton Abegunde

Assistant Professor, Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies

Email:

maehamil@iu.edu

Dr. Abegunde’s creative works and research are grounded in African-centered archival, contemplative, healing, poetic, and ritual practices that address inter-generational trauma caused by anti-Black racism, genocide, and sexual violence in the US, Brazil, Benin (Nigeria), and Juba, South Sudan. Through Spirit & Place, Dr. Abegunde is a Civic Reflections trainer, a Powerful Conversations on Race facilitator, and the creator of the Racial Trauma and Healing series.

Stephanie Andrea Allen

Assistant Professor, Department of Gender Studies

Email:

sa15@iu.edu

Dr. Allen’s research interests include Black lesbian literary and cultural histories, Black feminisms, writing communities, and Black speculative fiction. Her current book project examines how Black lesbian literature and film reflects the material realities of Black lesbian lived experiences, as well as how it responds to and resists the heteropatriarchal systems that contribute to the invisibility of Black lesbians in popular and literary culture. Additionally, she is active in several literary communities, including serving as co-founder of the Black Lesbian Literary Collective and as Publisher and Editor-in-Chief at BLF Press. She is also the author of two short story collections.

Ishan Ashutosh

Assistant Professor, Department of Geography

Email:

iashutos@indiana.edu

Dr. Ashutosh is a critical human geographer whose work encompasses the study of migration, the politics of race and ethnicity from an international and comparative perspective, and urban studies. His research examines the multiple and contested representations of South Asia through projects situated in migration and area studies.

Aleshia Barajas

Assistant Professor, Department of American Studies

Email:

alebara@iu.edu

Clark Barwick

Senior Lecturer, Kelly School of Business

Email:

mbarwick@indiana.edu

Dr. Barwick is a literary critic and cultural historian whose research focuses on African American literature and the racial politics of cultural memory. His current project examines the “making” of the Harlem Renaissance, particularly in regards to how certain African American lives, texts, and performances have been neglected in the period’s ongoing canon formation.

Liza Black

Assistant Professor of History and Native American and Indigenous Studies

Email:

blackli@iu.edu

Dr. Black researches and teaches on American Indian history. Her first book is Picturing Indians, a labor history of Native people in movies. Her new book, How to Get Away with Murder, is a transnational history of the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women.

James Brooks

Assistant Professor, Department of Counseling and Educational Psychology, School of Education

Email:

jamebroo@iu.edu

Dr. Brooks’ research examines how race and the understanding of race impact intimate relationships. His work straddles relationship science and intergroup dynamics to explore how the experience of normal developmental processes in relationships are expressed when race is salient. His work centers the experiences of partners in interracial relationships, multiracial families, and people of color.

Cara Caddoo

Associate Professor, Department of History and The Media School

Email:

ccaddoo@indiana.edu

Dr. Caddoo's research examines popular culture, print and visual media, religion, and historical intersections of race, gender, and ethnicity. Her work focuses on 19th and 20th century social, political, and institutional formations organized around the idea of blackness, and how African Americans and Asian Americans contributed to these developments. Her book, Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life (Harvard UP), is a history of early African American cinema.

Koji Chavez

Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology

Email:

kochavez@iu.edu

Dr. Chavez is a sociologist whose current research focuses on inequality-producing social processes within organizations. Specifically, he focuses on how gender, race, ethnicity, and "foreignness" influence job candidate evaluations and selection, and legitimation of hiring decisions. Dr. Chavez takes a "mixed methods" approach to his work to provide a comprehensive view of sociological phenomena. He also teaches courses on the sociology of work, and on race and ethnic intergroup relations.

Deborah Cohn

Professor, Departments of American Studies and Spanish and Portuguese

Email:

dncohn@indiana.edu

Dr. Cohn's research interests include comparative literatures of the Americas, the Mexican Intelligentsia, and the Global South. Her current project examines the promotion of Latin American literature in the U.S. during the 1960s and 1970s, studying how U.S. Cold War politics played a role in motivating support for this activity.

Carlos Colmenares Gil

Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature

Email:

ccolmena@iu.edu

Dr. Colmenares Gil studies the Spanish-Caribbean, continental Caribbean, and Brazil, specifically how the cultural expressions (literature, film, music) from these areas are immersed, or resist to be immersed, in a cosmopolitan logic which translates and creates a simplified structure of critical reception for them. My work engages with a long tradition of Latin American thought as well as continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, and anthropology, examining questions of high and low art, the idea of the popular, the hyper and translocal, and the intellectual life of minoritized subjects. I have published on social theorist Alejandro Moreno and on Afro-Venezuelan music. Currently, I am working on a book project focused on Venezuelan poetry and the critique of interiority. In parallel, I continue to research on Afro-Latin drums and the voices and chants that accompany them.

Ryan Comfort

Assistant Professor, The Media School

Email:

rcomfort@indiana.edu

Ryan's research examines the production roles, media frames, and audience effects created when Native Americans participate in visual media creation and dissemination. As a Native American (KBIC Ojibwe) producer of short-form documentary narratives himself, Ryan is deeply invested in conducting applied research in Native American communities. He is currently working on a documentary production project with the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma on the revitalization of the traditional game of Stickball.

Vanessa Cruz Nichols

Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science

Email:

vcruznic@iu.edu

Dr. Cruz Nichols specializes in American Politics, with research interests within political participation, public opinion, identity politics, and race and ethnicity politics. The policy scope of her book project is based on immigration policy threat and policy promises and how U.S. Latino adults respond to these calls of action. Dr. Cruz Nichols was a co-student investigator in the 2015 Latino National Health and Immigrant Survey.

Irit Dekel

Assistant Professor, Department of Germanic Studies and Borns Jewish Studies Program

Email:

idekel@iu.edu

Dr. Dekel's research interests include: memory politics; belonging and racism in Germany; and ethnic, religious and gender inequality. She has recently published on public debates about antisemitism in Germany and the Israeli migration to Berlin. Her book Mediation at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin (2013) analyzes the various forms of visitor engagement at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, and moral transformation surrounding Holocaust memory in the 21st century. She is currently working on a monograph that examines the roles available for and performed by various minority groups in Germany with respect to that nation's genocidal pasts.

Christopher DeSante

Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science

Email:

cdesante@indiana.edu

Dr. DeSante's research examines race and racism in America, American political partisanship, and political methodology. His past work explores attitudes toward racialized and redistributive policies such as welfare, testing whether ‘hard work' is rewarded in a color-blind manner, and his current book project examines racial attitudes in American politics.

Olivia Ekeh

Assistant Professor, Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies

Email:

oekeh@iu.edu

Dr. Ekeh’s research interest includes 20th Century Black history, popular culture and music. She utilizes and interdisciplinary approach to interrogating and engaging the histories of Black folk through the assessment of music, culture and literature. She is currently working on a book project, a culturally historical examination of the Black experiences that formed both the fringes and mainstream of the soul era.  

Brad Fulton

Associate Professor, O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs

Email:

fulton@iu.edu

Dr. Fulton is a sociologist whose research examines the social, political, and economic impact of community-based organizations. He directs the National Study of Community Organizing—a multi-level study that analyzes the causes and consequences of racial, socioeconomic, and religious diversity within grassroots advocacy organizations. He co-authored A Shared Future: Faith-Based Organizing for Racial Equity and Ethical Democracy (University of Chicago Press).

Ross Gay

Professor, Department of English

Email:

rgay@indiana.edu

Dr. Gay is the author of three books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released by Algonquin Books in 2019. He is currently at work on a book-length essay about gardens, land, race, nation and the imagination, called This Black Earth.

Faye Gleisser

Associate Professor, Department of Art History

Email:

frgleiss@indiana.edu

Dr. Gleisser is a curator and interdisciplinary scholar and teacher who explores constructions of race and gender in contemporary art, with a focus on art produced and displayed in the United States. Faye’s areas of specialization include art and theory of the African Diaspora, theories of abstraction, curatorial activism, and photographic imaginaries of crime, whiteness, and surveillance. Her current book project analyzes how artists’ deployment of guerrilla tactics in art negotiates cinematic and televisual expressions of militancy, policing, and criminal code reform in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s.

Andrew Gonzalez

Assistant Professor of Surgery, Department of Surgery, IU School of Medicine

Email:

andrewg@iu.edu

Dr. Gonzalez is a vascular surgeon-scientist whose research focuses on amputation prevention and reducing racial disparities for patients with peripheral arterial disease by integrating of artificial intelligence and design-thinking into vascular pathways of care. Dr. Gonzalez’s research explores best practices for identifying and addressing bias in the development, implementation, and curation of healthcare AI algorithms. His work is funded by a K12 Learning Health Systems Award from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. He also serves as the 2021-23 Omenn Fellow for the National Academy of Medicine

Dorainne Green

Assistant Professor, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences

Email:

dojlevy@indiana.edu

Dr. Green’s research explores the pathways through which stigma-related stressors such as group-based discrimination and stereotype threat contribute to disparities in education and health between socially advantaged and socially disadvantaged individuals. A primary interest is the identification of strategies to help marginalized individuals manage the challenges of navigating diverse spaces, including those with the potential to expose them to stigma-related stressors.

Landon Shane Greene

Professor, Department of Anthropology

Email:

lsgreene@indiana.edu

Dr. Greene's research is motivated by an interest in movements for social justice and political transformation. He examines these movements through projects on urban subcultures, ethnicity, the environment, and the politics of culture in the Latin American context. His recent book project focuses on the unique position of punk rock musicians and artists in Lima during Peru's historical period of massive political violence in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Valerie Grim

Professor, Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies

Email:

vgrim@indiana.edu

Dr. Grim's research focuses on African American history, agricultural history, black rural communities, and the black family. Her current book projects examine white paternalism and black self-determinism in a Mississippi Delta Community from 1910-1970 and black farmers' protests against the United States Department of Agriculture from 1995-2005.

Vivian Nun Halloran

Professor, Departments of American Studies and English; Associate Dean for Diversity and Inclusion, College of Arts and Sciences

Email:

vhallora@indiana.edu

Dr. Halloran specializes in Caribbean literature and her research explores the connections between art, history, literature, and performance. Her work has focused on plays as vehicles through which the political history of various islands has impacted how contemporary Caribbean writers throughout the diaspora think through and perform their national and/or collective Caribbean identities. In addition she engages in work on Literary Food Studies, examining culinary memoirs related to the slave trade.

Clovia Hamilton

Assistant Professor, Department of Business Law and Ethics, Kelley School of Business

Email:

hamilcl@iu.edu

Dr. Hamilton is a USPTO registered patent attorney and former patent examiner. She teaches business law and ethics. Her research is focused on technology transfer and the intersection of technology and society. She focuses on increasing racial diversity in technology transfer, social injustices related to high-tech and AI ethics. Clovia earned a JD from Atlanta's John Marshall Law School; a Master of Laws (LLM) degree in intellectual property law from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign; an MBA degree from Wesleyan College; and a Ph.D. degree in Industrial & Systems Engineering from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She served as the Director of Intellectual Property and Research Compliance for Old Dominion University, and as a Technology Transfer Specialist for the EPA, the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and as a consultant.

Elaine M. Hernandez

Associate Professor, Department of Sociology

Email:

ehernan@indiana.edu

Inequities in health are ubiquitous. Using expertise in medical sociology, health demography, and health policy, Dr. Hernandez aims to understand the social, structural, and biological processes that create and perpetuate these inequities. She is currently a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Interdisciplinary Research Leader, conducting a mixed-methods study examining experiences among those using Medicaid during recent years. She also serves on the board of the Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Sciences.

Sarah Imhoff

Assistant Professor, Department of Religious Studies and Borns Jewish Studies Program

Email:

seimhoff@indiana.edu

Dr. Imhoff's research interests include: Gender and American Jewish History, race and Jewishness, Rabbinic Literature, and American religious history. One of her current research projects deals with the relationship of race and DNA in defining Jewish identity and community. She is currently completing her first monograph, Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism.

Karen Inouye

Ruth N. Halls Associate Professor, Departments of History and American Studies

Email:

kinouye@indiana.edu

Dr. Inouye's research interests focus on Asian American and Asian Canadian Studies, transnational American Studies, 20th-Century U.S. History, and critical race studies. Her book, The Long Afterlife of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration (Stanford University Press, 2016) focuses on questions of belonging, race and ethnicity. Her next book project concerns the cultural and political impacts of the decision to build prison camps for Nikkei on Native American and Indigenous lands.

Jason Baird Jackson

Ruth N. Halls Professor of Folklore and Anthropology

Email:

jbj@indiana.edu

Dr. Jackson is a folklorist, ethnologist, and cultural anthropologist whose CRRES-relevant work centers on questions of indigeneity and ethnicity. He has partnered with Native American communities and organizations in Oklahoma since 1993 and has participated in research collaborations among minoritized ethnic groups (nationalities) in Southwest China since 2013. At IU, he leads the Material Culture and Heritage Studies Laboratory and he edits the Material Vernaculars book series for Indiana University Press. He is also a Research Affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History and of the University of Oklahoma’s Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. He is presently working on a book about issues of heritage, identity, and craft practice in multiethnic Southwest China.

Pamela Braboy Jackson

Provost Professor, Department of Sociology

Email:

pjackson@indiana.edu

Dr. Jackson served as the Founding & Inaugural Director for CRRES from 2012-14. Her research focuses on stress and mental health, healthcare disparities, and the impact of work and family roles on well-being. She most recently published a book entitled Family Stories, with Dr. Rashawn Ray, which uses narrative accounts of family situations to reveal how African American, Mexican American, and white families in the U.S. navigate the social system we call the family.

Aziza Khazzoom

Associate Professor, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

Email:

khazzoom@indiana.edu

Dr. Khazzoom's work traces the formation of ethnic inequality among Jews in Israel, combining quantitative and qualitative methods. She is the author of Shifting Ethnic Boundaries and Inequality in Israel, Or: How the Polish Peddler Became a German Intellectual (Stanford University Press).

David Konisky

Professor, O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs

Email:

dkonisky@indiana.edu

Dr. Konisky is a political scientist whose research focuses on U.S. environmental and energy policy, with a particular emphasis on regulation, federalism and state politics, public opinion, and environmental justice. His recent research has examined racial and ethnic disparities in government enforcement of pollution control laws, the effectiveness of federal environmental justice policy, and how the energy transition is affecting vulnerable communities.

Hyeyoung Kwon

Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology

Email:

kwonhye@indiana.edu

Dr. Kwon is a sociologist whose work focuses on race/ethnicity, immigration, and childhood/family. Her research mainly examines how marginalized actors respond to social exclusion in ways that reproduce and challenge multiple inequalities. Her current work examines this question through the case of bilingual working-class Mexican-and Korean-Americans who navigate racialized nativism as “language brokers” for their families in adult-centric, English-speaking institutions. Dr. Kwon previously served as a CRRES postdoctoral fellow.

Jennifer Lee

Associate Professor, Department of Sociology

Email:

lee484@indiana.edu

Dr. Jennifer Lee's research and teaching interests include sociology of education, immigration, and Asian American studies. Her current work examines how co-ethnic communities and bilingual proficiency influence the educational and occupational experiences and outcomes of Asian and Latino children of immigrants. In other work, Dr. Lee has examined Asian immigrants' employment in ethnic economies, as well as racial attitudes towards Asian Americans.

Sonia Song-Ha Lee

Associate Professor, Department of American Studies and Latino Studies Program

Email:

soslee@iu.edu

Dr. Sonia Song-Ha Lee is a social, political, and intellectual historian of twentieth-century United States, with particular interests in race, ethnicity and the history of medicine. She investigates the ways in which the labor economy, social movements, electoral politics, housing reforms, educational curricula, and mental health treatment shaped contemporary notions of blackness and latinidad in the United States.

Alex Lichtenstein

Professor, Department of History

Email:

lichtens@indiana.edu

Dr. Lichtenstein's work centers on the intersection of labor history and the struggle for racial justice in societies shaped by white supremacy, particularly the U.S. South (1865-1954) and 20th-century South Africa. His current book project, Trouble in Paradise: Labor Radicalism, Race Relations, and Anticommunism in Florida, 1940-1960, explores the interplay of the civil rights and labor movements in Florida during the 1940s. His book on photographer Margaret Bourke-White's 1950 trip to South Africa will be published by Indiana University Press in 2015.

Noriko Manabe

Professor of Music Theory

Email:

nmanabe@iu.edu

Dr. Noriko Manabe conducts research on music in social movements and hip hop in Japan, Asian America, and the US. Her first monograph, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Protest Music after Fukushima, explores music of the antinuclear movement and the roles that music and musicians play in four spaces of contention: cyberspace, demonstrations, festivals, and recordings. She has also published on Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” and the sonic dynamics of protests in Japan and the US. She is editor of 33-1/3 Japan, a book series on Japanese popular music from Bloomsbury, and co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Protest Music (with Eric Drott).

Michael T. Martin

Professor, Cinema and Media Studies

Email:

martinmt@indiana.edu

Dr. Martin is currently the Director of the Black Film Archives and his research interests include diasporic and émigré formations, transnational migration, and diasporic and postcolonial film. He is currently working on two book projects, Caribbean Cinemas: Evolution, Articulations, Transnationality and History Betrayed: Gillo Pontecorvo's Cinema of Decolonization. Dr. Martin's other works have examined race and gender in Ed Bland's Cry of Jazz, and the pioneering of the African American documentary tradition.

Sylvia Martinez

Associate Professor, Department of Education Leadership and Policy Studies, School of Education

Email:

symartin@indiana.edu

Dr. Martinez's research interests include women's work experiences, Latino/a sociology, and the sociology of education. Current work examines what Latino/a high school students know about accessing a post-secondary education and how they access that information. Additionally, Dr. Martinez has received a grant to examine the role of ethnic identity on participation in a college Latino cultural center, and how this may impact retention in higher education.

Jason McGraw

Associate Professor, Department of History

Email:

jpmcgraw@indiana.edu

Dr. McGraw’s research examines the overlapping processes of slavery, emancipation, colonialism, and capitalism that produced the Atlantic World. His book, The Work of Recognition: Caribbean Colombia and the Postemancipation Struggle for Citizenship (UNC Press), tells the story of postemancipation Colombia, and received the 2015 Michael Jiménez Prize in the Colombia Section from the Latin American Studies Association.

Vanessa Miller

Assistant Professor, School of Education

Email:

vandmill@iu.edu

Vanessa Miller is an Assistant Professor in the School of Education. She is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work focuses on education law (P-20), race and the law, school and university police, and prison education. She uses critical frameworks and research methodologies to analyze the intersection of education, law, and the criminal legal system.

Juan Ignacio Mora

Assistant Professor, Department of History and Latino Studies Program

Email:

jimora@iu.edu

Dr. Mora is an Assistant Professor of History and Latino Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is a former Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society. His in-progress book is titled Latinx Encounters: How Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Puerto Ricans Made the Modern Midwest. His writing can be found in The Nation and the Journal of American Ethnic History.

Mary C. Murphy

Associate Professor, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Cognitive Science Program

Email:

mcmpsych@indiana.edu

Dr. Murphy's research focuses on understanding how people’s social identities and group memberships, such as gender, race, and socio-economic status, interact with the contexts they encounter to affect people’s thoughts, feelings, motivation, and performance. In the realm of education, her research illuminates the situational cues that influence students’ academic motivation and achievement. She develops, implements, and evaluates social psychological interventions that reduce identity threat for students. In the realm of organizations and tech, her research examines barriers and solutions for increasing gender and racial diversity in STEM fields.

Walton Muyumba

Associate Professor, Department of English, Assistant Director of Creative Writing

Email:

wmuyumba@indiana.edu

Dr. Muyumba is a literary scholar and author. Professor Muyumba’s areas of research include African American literature, African Diaspora literature, literary and arts criticism, creative nonfiction, Black Atlantic studies, jazz studies, cultural studies, pragmatism, and postcolonial studies. He is currently completing a book about contemporary American literary art and popular music, as well as undertaking projects on John Edgar Wideman’s literary works and about ethnic American art in the age of terrorism.

Amrita Chakrabarti Myers

Associate Professor, Departments of History and Gender Studies

Email:

apmyers@indiana.edu

Dr. Myers' research interests focus on race, gender, freedom, and citizenship and the ways in which these constructs intersect with one another in the lives of black women in the Old South. Her recent book, Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston, (UNC Press) illuminates the lives of free black women, both legal and de facto, in Charleston, South Carolina, from 1790-1860. Her current book project examines interracial families and relationships in the antebellum South.

Ashlyn Aiko Nelson

Associate Professor, School of Public and Environmental Affairs

Email:

ashlyn@indiana.edu

Dr. Nelson studies how the education market is influenced by housing markets, financial institutions, and policies. Her work examines the causes and consequences of inequality in the overlapping areas of housing and education, with articles exploring credit scores, race, and residential sorting as well as non-English speakers' barriers to mortgage access.

John Nieto-Phillips

Associate Professor, Department of History

Email:

jnietoph@indiana.edu

Dr. Nieto-Phillips' research interests center on U.S. Latina/o history, race and citizenship, and Latin America and the Caribbean. In the classroom and in his research, he explores the various means by which Latinas and Latinos have sought full citizenship and equality in the schools, in politics, and in public spaces.

Dina Okamoto

Professor, Department of Sociology

Email:

dokamoto@indiana.edu

Dr. Okamoto's research focuses on understanding how group boundaries and identities shift and change, which has broader implications for racial formation, immigrant incorporation, as well as intergroup conflict and cooperation. Her recent book, Redefining Race: Asian American Panethnicity and Shifting Ethnic Boundaries (Russell Sage Foundation), traces the complex evolution of "Asian American" as a panethnic label and identity.

Alberto Ortega

Assistant Professor, O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs

Email:

alorte@iu.edu

Dr. Ortega is an applied microeconomist with research that examines how social factors and social policies affect the health and educational outcomes of vulnerable populations. Previous work examined funding inequities faced by minority-serving institutions of higher education. Some of his current research evaluates the role of social welfare policy in access to substance use treatment.

Solimar Otero

Professor, Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology

Email:

solioter@iu.edu

Dr. Otero is a folklorist whose research centers on gender, sexuality, Afrolatinx spirituality, and Yoruba traditional religion in folklore, literature, and ethnography. Her newest book, Archives of Conjure: Stories of the Dead in Afrolatinx Cultures (Columbia UP), explores how Afrolatinx spirits guide collaborative spiritual-scholarly activist work through rituals and the creation of material culture. By examining spirit mediumship through a Caribbean cross-cultural poetics, she shows how divinities and ancestors serve as active agents in shaping the experiences of gender, sexuality, and race.

Radhika Parameswaran

Herman B. Wells Endowed Professor, Journalism, The Media School

Email:

rparames@indiana.edu

Dr. Parameswaran researches media and its intersections with gender, ethnicity, race, and nation in the context of globalizing India. Her current project examines how the imaginative and resistant media tactics of activist citizens form an emergent global civil society that is centered on challenging colorism and racism in South Asian communities. Dr. Parameswaran is the Editor of Communication, Culture & Critique, a flagship journal of the International Communication Association.

Oscar Patrón

Assistant Professor, Higher Education and Student Affairs, School of Education

Email:

opatron@iu.edu

Dr. Patrón's research interests broadly examine the racialized, gendered, and sexualized experiences of Latina/o students in higher education; men of color; student success; and resilience. His dissertation, which was funded by a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation dissertation fellowship, examined processes of resilience that gay Latino men undergo as it relates to social identities that are most salient to them. Patrón was a recipient of the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education Graduate Student Fellow, Faculty First-Look, K. Leroy Irvis Fellowship, and McNair Scholars awards.

Gabriel Peoples

Assistant Professor, Department of Gender Studies

Email:

gpeoples@iu.edu

Dr. Peoples is a Black Performance theorist and practitioner in Gender studies. He is currently generating a book manuscript, Goin’ Viral: Uncontrollable Black Performance, which considers the risks and rewards of Black bodies that have gained accelerated popular awareness through visual and sonic media.

Tennisha Riley

Assistant Professor, Department of Counseling and Educational Psychology, School of Education

Email:

rileytn@iu.edu

Dr. Riley is a Developmental Psychologist whose research focuses on the emotional development of Black youth. Specifically, her research examines how Black youth's social contexts (family, friends, and school) influence emotion expression and emotion regulation and the role emotions play in Black youth's decisions to engage in both risk-related and prosocial behaviors. Much of her work is focused on the development of interventions to promote Black youth's emotional well-being.

Alan C. Roberts

Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences

Email:

alarober@indiana.edu

Dr. Roberts' research interests focus on personality and individual differences in vulnerability to eating pathology and weight disorders. Recent projects have examined whether images of female beauty and ideal body type have changed over time, as well as the relation between ethnicity, attitudes toward body weight, dating behavior, and female body satisfaction.

Judith Rodriguez

Assistant Professor, Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies; Assistant Professor, Latino Studies

Email:

jurodr@iu.edu

Dr. Rodriguez specializes in transdisciplinary approaches to critical black theory, Afro-Latinx Studies, and Caribbean philosophical thought. Specifically, her work draws together research in Puerto Rican aesthetics and performance studies with black studies and black feminist theory, Afro-Caribbean Philosophy, and gender and sexuality studies. Her first book manuscript explores works of literature, music, documentary film, and theatre and performance since the 1930s that have critiqued—and imagined alternatives to—the antiblack and heteropatriarchal violence produced through Puerto Rican ethnonationalism on the island and its diaspora.

Olga Rodriguez-Ulloa

Assistant Professor, American Studies and Latino Studies Program

Email:

olgrodri@iu.edu

Dr. Rodriguez-Ulloa is a cultural theorist focused on Indigeneity, Blackness, and trans feminism in the Americas. Her book project “Sadistic Cholas. Sex and Violence in Contemporary Peru” examines popular and experimental music, visual arts, performance, literature, and grassroots organizing by people and colectivas who identify as chola (urban indigenous), negra (Black woman), travesti, trans, non-binary, and queer feminists. In their confrontation with the violences of coloniality, patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy, they rehearse aesthetics of self-defense, anger, and revenge, while contemplating the making of new commons via care and radical love or munay in Quechua. For an autoethnographic and literary perspective of the book see “Sadistic Chola Manifesto.” In the same vein, Rodríguez-Ulloa’s previous work focused on systemic critiques channeled through punk aesthetics and politics of making. Check her co-edited volume Punk. Las Américas Edition (2021).

Fabio Rojas

Professor, Department of Sociology

Email:

frojas@indiana.edu

Dr. Rojas' research interests include organizational analysis, political sociology of social movements, sociology of education, and mathematical sociology. His work has focused on how the Black Power Movement became an academic discipline and a variety of topics related to the anti-war movement. His new book, Party in the Street: The Antiwar Movement and the Democratic Party after 9/11, explores the interaction between political parties and social movements in the United States.

Eric Sader

Lecturer, Department of Business Law and Ethics, Kelley School of Business

Email:

easader@iu.edu

Professor Sader brings to the Center a unique combined background as a licensed attorney, licensed social worker, and court-approved mediator. Immediately prior to joining Kelley School of Business, Sader served as Bloomington’s Assistant Director of Housing and Neighborhood Development. Past service experiences in part include Chair of Monroe County Human Rights Commission, President of Indiana National Association of Social Workers, and Board Member of Kansas American Civil Liberties Union. Sader’s current primary career focus is on teaching and pedagogy, devoting substantial coverage to issues of race and ethnicity, most emphatically in his teaching of Ethics and Equity in Diverse Business Organizations. Wider intersectional diversity is emphasized by Sader in his current oversight of social work practicum at IU Bloomington’s LGBTQ+ Culture Center, and as recognized in his past work as a DEIJ Faculty Fellow for IU’s Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning and his more recent recognition as a recipient of IU’s 2023 Inclusive Excellence Award.

Micol Seigel

Professor, Departments of American Studies and History

Email:

mseigel@indiana.edu

Dr. Seigel's research interests include: policing, prisons, and race in the Americas; critical ethnic studies; popular culture; Latin American studies; postcolonial and queer theory; and cultural studies. She is a member of Critical Prison Studies caucus of the American Studies Association, and the organizing collective of the Tepotzlán Institute for Transnational Studies of the Americas. Her recent works examine the global currents of U.S. prison growth and racialization in the era of hyperincarceration.

Kosali Simon

Herman B Wells Endowed Professor, School of Public and Environmental Affairs

Email:

simonkos@indiana.edu

Kosali Simon, an economist in the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs is also the Associate Vice Provost of Health Sciences for the campus. She studies topics at the intersection of health policy, health care, population health and related outcomes, especially among at-risk populations, using several large-scale data resources. As an example, in past work she has examined race and ethnic disparities in COVID-19 hospitalizations and mortality in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. She is Editor of Journal of Health Economics, and co-editor of Journal of Human Resources, and currently serving as Vice President of Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM).

Marvin Sterling

Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology

Email:

mdsterli@indiana.edu

Dr. Sterling's research interests include contemporary Japan, African Diaspora, race, social identity, Afro-Asia, Performance Studies, transnationalism, and human rights. He has examined the Japanese community in Jamaica, with his first book, Babylon East: Performing Dancehall, Roots Reggae and Rastafari in Japan, investigating the ways that many Japanese involved in reggae as musicians and dancers, and those deeply engaged with Rastafari as a spiritual practice, seek to reimagine their lives through Jamaican culture. Dr. Sterling recently developed a new line of research, which traces the development of human rights discourse in Jamaica.

Vasti Torres

Executive Associate Dean

Email:

vatorres@iu.edu

Vasti Torres’ research focuses on the success of marginalized college students. Her works considers the intersecting roles of identity, social class, and race/ethnicity in the college experiences. She works with the community college initiative Achieving the Dream and is active in several educational research associations as well as student services professional associations. She is the Editor of the Journal of College Student Development.

Alberto Varon

Associate Professor, English

Email:

avaron@indiana.edu

Dr. Varon’s research and teaching is driven by questions of citizenship, race, and representation in American cultures; his research focuses on Latinx cultures from the 19th century to the present and he teaches courses in interdisciplinary American and Latinx cultures. Dr. Varon’s first book, Before Chicano: Citizenship and the Making of Mexican American Manhood, 1848-1959 examined how manhood offered a discursive strategy through which Mexican Americans processed cultural integration into the US. Currently, he is working on two book-length projects on Latinx narratives across media.

Vivek Vellanki

Assistant Professor, School of Education

Email:

vvellan@iu.edu

Vivek Vellanki likes to look at photographs, make photographs, and think about how photographs shape our understanding of the world and each other. His ongoing community-based work, The Passport Photo Project, invites migrants and refugees to play with and transform passport photographs. He enjoys playing, pondering the existential questions that children ask us, and travelling (usually by road) with friends.

Brenda R. Weber

Professor, Department of Gender Studies

Email:

breweber@indiana.edu

Dr. Weber’s research engages with a wide archive of mostly discredited cultural texts, including non-canonical nineteenth-century transatlantic women’s literature and contemporary media, specifically literature, film, and television. Her work questions how the identity is discursively gendered, constructed, and embodied through written and mediated means, as well as how gender, sex, sexuality, race, and class work together to inform notions of the “normative” self.

Maisha Wester

Associate Professor, American Studies, African American and African Diaspora Studies

Email:

mwester@indiana.edu

Dr. Wester’s general research interests are Gothic literature and Horror Film Studies. She was recently awarded a Global Professorship from the British Academy, and was a is 2017-2018 Fulbright scholar to the UK. Dr. Wester's research specifically interrogates the politics of black representation in Gothic literature and Horror film, how these tropes and trends are translated into actual sociopolitical discourse and legislation, and how Black diasporic authors and directors write back to and against these representations.

Jakobi Williams

Associate Professor, Departments of History and African American and African Diaspora Studies

Email:

jakowill@indiana.edu

Dr. Williams' research interests are centered on questions of resistance and the social justice revolutions found within the historic African American community. His most recent book, From the Bullet to the Ballot, demonstrates how Chicago's Black Power movement was both a response to and an extension of the city's civil rights movement.

Phoebe Wolfskill

Assistant Professor, Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies

Email:

pwolfski@indiana.edu

Dr. Wolfskill studies African American art history with a particular interest in complicating standard assumptions about the relationship between an artist’s racial identity and his or her artistic production. Her recent book, Archibald Motley Jr. and Racial Reinvention: The Old Negro in New Negro Art (Illinois, 2017) speaks to the complicated aesthetics and divergent ideologies surrounding the Negro Renaissance and Motley’s place within it.

Y. Joel Wong

Professor, Department of Counseling and Educational Psychology, School of Education

Email:

joelwong@indiana.edu

Dr. Wong's research interests are in the areas of Asian/Asian American psychology, the psychology of men and masculinities, and positive psychology (particularly gratitude and encouragement). In particular, he is interested in the relationship between cultural variables and mental health, such as risk and protective factors and help seeking patterns.

Cynthia Wu

Associate Professor, Department of Gender Studies

Email:

cynwu@iu.edu

Dr. Cynthia Wu's research focuses on gender, sexuality, and disability in the Asian diaspora in the United States. She is the author of Chang and Eng Reconnected: The Original Siamese Twins in American Culture and Sticky Rice: A Politics of Intraracial Desire. She is currently writing a manuscript on the U.S. military in the Asian American imagination.

Ellen Wu

Associate Professor, Department of History

Email:

wue@indiana.edu

Dr. Ellen Wu's research interests include 20th Century United States History, Asian American History, race and ethnicity, citizenship, migration, and Chinese diaspora. Her research asks questions regarding issues of race, immigration, citizenship, and nation through the lens of Asian American history. Her recent research has examined the transformation of Asians in the United States from the "yellow peril" to "model minorities."