Director
Dina Okamoto is the Director of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society (CRRES) and Professor of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research focuses on race and ethnicity, immigrant incorporation, as well as intergroup conflict and cooperation in the U.S. context.
Associate Director
Michelle Moyd is the Associate Director of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society (CRRES) and Associate Professor of History at Indiana University. She is a historian of eastern Africa, with special interests in the history of African soldiers and warfare. Other research interests include German colonial history, the history of racial thought in Europe, Africa, and the United States, and the history of race as a factor in labor and military recruitment processes in Africa and elsewhere.
Jessica Smith
CRRES Administrative Assistant
Jessica maintains the CRRES office and provides administrative support for the Center’s activities. She assists with the room reservations and scheduling of CRRES events such as the Speaker Series, Coffee with Affiliates, and the Postdoctoral Scholars Program. She makes travel arrangements for CRRES and processes funding requests and reimbursements for the Center. Jessica earned her B.A. in Psychology at Indiana University and brings years of experience in customer service and administrative work to the Center. If you have questions about travel, CRRES funding or reimbursements, room reservations, scheduling, or general inquiries about the Center, please contact Jessica.
Jasmine L. Davis-Randolph
CRRES Graduate Research Assistant
Jasmine L. Davis-Randolph is a Ph.D. Student in the Sociology department and her research areas are racial and ethnic identity, mental health, and social psychology. Jasmine’s research focuses on the impact of discrimination, trauma, and stigma on the well-being of marginalized communities. Additionally, she is interested in how race and ethnicity shape social interactions and its impact on the production and dissemination of policies. As the lead graduate assistant for CRRES, she manages the Undergraduate Research Program, helps coordinate programming and events, and provides outreach and marketing support. If you have questions about listservs, email communications, promoting a related event/project, or becoming a CRRES affiliate, please contact Jasmine.
Monica Heilman
CRRES Graduate Research Assistant
Monica Heilman is Ph.D. student in Sociology. She hails from Colorado, where she earned her degree in Sociology and Art at the University of Denver. After graduating, Monica taught English in South Korea, worked as a freelance digital marketing writer, and began designing enamel pins. Monica's research interests lie broadly in multiracial identity, shifting categorizations of race in the US, and race relations in South Korea. Her current work examines how multiracial individuals present their identities in the face of challenges to and expectations of an adherence to rigid racial categories. Monica assists in maintaining the CRRES website, marketing, and producing web content.
Shelley Rao
CRRES Graduate Research Assistant
Shelley's research interests focus on the intersections of race and ethnicity and immigration. She feels strongly about contributing intellectual knowledge about new and existing streams of Asian immigrants in the United States and their descendants. Her current work examines group positions and perceptions of fairness in academic and work settings. Prior to graduate school, she held professional roles in talent management and diversity, market research, and public policy.
Muna Adem
CRRES Graduate Research Assistant
Muna Adem is a graduate student in the Sociology program. She earned her MS in Applied Statistic in 2019. Broadly her reserach examines how immigration continues to reshape group boundaries and the consequences of these boundaries for social cohesion. In particular, she interested in the mechanisms that facilitate or hinder trust, solidarity, and cooperation as a result of ethno-racial diversity in the U.S. and Europe. Her current projects examine symbolic boundaries and national belonging (e.g., what makes someone a fellow citizen in contemporary society) and the consequences of social integration and "diverse" settings for ethnic and racial minorities in Europe. Muna assists with editing and posting research briefs so if you have any questions about the briefs, feel free to contact her.
Martin Law
CRRES Graduate Research Assistant
Martin Law is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Communication and Culture where he is completing a dissertation on indecorous and uncontrolled speech. He is a rhetorical theorist focusing on disability and Blackness thinking specifically about intersectional constructions of verbal eloquence. His other research interests include experimental music, radical democratic theory, disciplinary histories of communication studies, and labyrinths.
Jacob Castaneda
CRRES Social Media and Outreach Intern
Jacob Castaneda is a senior studying Sociology and Counseling at Indiana University. As the Social Media & Outreach undergraduate intern, his role at CRRES is to provide valuable content through our social media platforms. His research interest is on the racial and economic disparities within the U.S. educational system and aspires to become a research analyst in the future. Jacob is currently conducting his undergraduate honors thesis and is a proud Groups Scholar and a Sociology 4+1 Pathway Program recipient.
Assistant Professor, Department of Geography
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.
Clark Barwick
Senior Lecturer, Kelly School of Business
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.
Jeannine Bell
Richard S. Melvin Professor, Maurer School of Law
Dr. Bell is a founding member of the Michigan Journal of Race and Law and is a nationally recognized scholar in the area of policing and hate crime. Her newest book, Hate Thy Neighbor: Move-in Violence and the Persistence of Racial Segregation in American Housing (NYU Press) investigates anti-integration violence directed by white residents at minorities who move into their neighborhoods.
Cara Caddoo
Associate Professor, Department of History and The Media School
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
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
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.
Christopher DeSante
Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science
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.
Freda Fair
Assistant Professor, Department of Gender Studies
Dr. Freda Fair is an interdisciplinary scholar and teacher who studies race, gender, sexuality and culture in the United States with a focus on the American Midwest. Freda's research interests include queer politics and aesthetics, women of color feminist thought, labor, and social movement responses to policing, normativity, surveillance, and precarity.
Terri Francis
Associate Professor, The Media School
Dr. Francis researches noncommercial black film. In 2014 sx salon published her curated collection of essays, “Unexpected Archives: More Locations of Caribbean Film.” She served as guest editor of a close-up on Afrosurrealism in Film/Video for Black Camera, which explored experimental filmmaking and thought in African Diaspora cinema.
Ross Gay
Professor, Department of English
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.
Landon Shane Greene
Professor, Department of Anthropology
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
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
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.
Sarah Imhoff
Assistant Professor, Department of Religious Studies and Borns Jewish Studies Program
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
Associate Professor, Department of American Studies
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.
Pamela Braboy Jackson
Professor, Department of Sociology
Dr. Jackson served as the inaugural director for CRRES from 2012-14. Her research focuses on the impact of work and family roles on well-being. She has several projects underway including a book manuscript Family Stories, with Dr. Rashawn Ray, which uses narrative accounts of family situations to reveal how black and white families in the U.S. navigate the social system we call the family.
Alisha Jones
Assistant Professor, Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology
Dr. Jones is an ethnomusicologist whose research interests include musical masculinities, music and theology, business and the music industry, music and mysticism, Western European art music, vocal pedagogies of the world, and African-American music. Her research examines black men's performance of gender and sexuality in gospel music and African American worship settings. She is also an engaged ethnomusicologist and practitioner whose research is incorporated in public arts programming in low income, high minority neighborhoods.
Aziza Khazzoom
Associate Professor, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures
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
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
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
Dr. 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
Dr. 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
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.
Michael T. Martin
Professor, Cinema and Media Studies
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
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
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.
Rasul Mowatt
Professor, Department of Recreation, Park, and Tourism Studies, School of Public Health
Dr. Mowatt is an Affiliate Faculty Member in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies and his primary research interests are leisure behavior, social justice, cultural studies, and critical pedagogy. Dr. Mowatt's recent works have examined black, female body hypervisibility and invisibility, as well as heterosexism in campus recreational club sports.
Michelle Moyd
Associate Professor, Department of History
Dr. Moyd's research interests include African military history, militaries and labor, the everyday history of colonialism, and power and its expressions. Her first book, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa, examines the social and cultural history of African soldiers in the colonial army of German East Africa, today's Tanzania. Dr. Moyd is currently working on a short book, Africa, Africans, and the First World War, which will examine the spectrum of African experiences in the war.
Mary C. Murphy
Associate Professor, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Cognitive Science Program
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
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
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
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.
Radhika Parameswaran
Herman B. Wells Endowed Professor, Journalism, The Media School
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.
John Nieto-Phillips
Associate Professor, Department of History
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
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.
Alan C. Roberts
Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
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.
Fabio Rojas
Professor, Department of Sociology
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.
Micol Seigel
Professor, Departments of American Studies and History
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.
Marvin Sterling
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology
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.
Brenda R. Weber
Professor, Department of Gender Studies
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.
Jakobi Williams
Associate Professor, Departments of History and African American and African Diaspora Studies
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
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
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
Dr. 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
Dr. 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."
Faye Gleisser
Assistant Professor, Department of Art History
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.
Alberto Ortega
Assistant Professor, O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs
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.
Maisha Wester
Associate Professor, American Studies, African American and African Diaspora Studies
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.
Carlos Avenancio-Leon
Assistant Professor, Kelley School of Business
Dr. Avenancio-León is an economist whose work lies at the intersection of finance, labor economics, and political economy. His research agenda focuses on Equitable Finance; i.e. the role of financial mechanisms in economic redistribution and its implications for disadvantaged communities and inequality. More specifically, some of his recent work in this area has documented the link between incarceration and access to credit, and between corporate debt and racial gaps in job security.
Marissa Moorman
Associate Professor, Department of History and The Media School
Dr. Moorman’s research covers African history and media studies. Her two books, Powerful Frequencies: Radio, State Power, and the Cold War in Angola, 1933-2002 and Intonations: a Social History of Music and Nation in Luanda, Angola, 1945-Recent Times, deal with the dense relations between culture, media, and politics. Her current research project addresses global black politics in the 1976 Angola trial of mercenaries. Moorman is on the editorial board of Africa is a Country; The blog that is not about Bono, famine or Obama; and an editor of The Journal of African History.
Vanessa Cruz Nichols
Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science
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.
Solimar Otero
Professor, Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology
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.
Alberto Varon
Associate Professor, English
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.
Victoria Perez
Assistant Professor, O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs
Dr. Perez is an applied economist interested in health and public economics. Her current research relates to how public policy affects healthcare access among vulnerable populations and how that access affects the social welfare of the individual and the median voter. Her research focuses on fraud enforcement within public insurance programs; the effect of delivery and administration of public health insurance on government budgets and individual access to healthcare; and hospital competition in an age of social media and digital advertising.
Steve Rahko
Lecturer, Kelley School of Business
Dr. Rahko is a rhetorical critic whose research orbits around two central pillars of contemporary American public culture: the rhetoric of late-capitalism and the emerging rhetoric of America as “post-racial.” His research agenda focuses on representations of race in American popular culture, and he is currently co-editing a book with the University Press of Mississippi titled Rupturing Post-Racial Fantasies: The Rhetorical Politics of Race and American Popular Culture Since the Ferguson Uprisings.
James Brooks
Assistant Professor, Department of Counseling and Educational Psychology, School of Education
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.
Tennisha Riley
Assistant Professor, Department of Counseling and Educational Psychology, School of Education
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.
Dorainne Green
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
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.
Liza Black
Assistant Professor of History and Native American and Indigenous Studies
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.
Brad Fulton
Associate Professor, O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs
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)
Ryan Comfort
Doctoral Student, The Media School
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.
Giselle Cunanan
Ph.D. Student, Department of American Studies
Giselle situates her work in the overlapping fields of Critical Ethnic Studies and Asian American Studies to study how colonial histories and narrations of identity shape the material realities of Filipinos’ everyday lives. She is particularly interested in the larger paradoxes of racialization, identification, and resistance as they exist for Filipinos who occupy a vexed position to the U.S. state. Pursuing her questions via ethnography and in-depth interviews, Giselle studies the ways that Filipinos work with and against underlying conditions of subjectivity that structurally positon Filipinos in close relation to non-Filipino groups.
Jessica David
Ph.D. Student, Department of Counseling Psychology
Jessica's research interests include racial identity, stress and coping, and student-athlete health and holistic development. She is also a graduate assistant for the Groups Scholars Program, an initiative created to address low attendance rates of marginalized populations and first-generation college students. As a member of the Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) Diversity Outreach Team, she works to raise mental health awareness in traditionally underserved populations on IU's campus.
Ryan J. Davis
Ph.D. Student, Higher Education (School of Education)
Ryan's research interests focus on understanding pedagogies that influence learning and success in STEM disciplines, particularly among underrepresented students of color. He coauthored the monograph Racial and Ethnic Minorities Students’ Success in STEM Education (Jossey-Bass) and he has coauthored 10 peer reviewed journal articles about the role of race in the experiences and outcomes of college students.
Carrie Fudickar
Ph.D. Student, Department of History
Carrie's research interests include the intersections of African American and Native American history, Black autonomy in the American West, and Race and Colonialism. Her dissertation topic covers Afro-Creek resistance movements from the Civil War through the Tulsa Race Riot.
Kirk A. Harris
Ph.D. Student, Department of Political Science
Kirk studies democracy and development in Sub-Saharan Africa – a research focus that brings together work on the politics of development, ethnicity, and democratic accountability. Kirk’s dissertation examines how variation in the political salience of ethnicity in Kenya mediates the provision of local public goods like schools, clinics, and roads by Kenya’s Constituency Development Fund (CDF).
Monica Heilman
Ph.D. Student, Department of Sociology
Monica's research interests include multiracial identity, racial categorization, and racial and ethnic relations in South Korea. Her current work examines the strategies multiracial individuals employ when presenting their identities to others in the face of challenges ranging from interpersonal to structural levels. After teaching in South Korea for two years, Monica has also become interested in exploring the social dynamics and tensions that have emerged with Korea's growing multiracial population.
Mihee Kim-Kort
Ph.D. Student, Religious Studies
Mihee is a 4th year doctoral student in Religious Studies. Her primary area of research is Religion in the Americas, and she is interested in Asian American literature, Black feminist theory, transpacific studies, and US national identity. She plans to broadly interrogate notions of the "human" and its connection to American Protestant discourses of purity. More specifically, she anticipates her future project will explore how US military interventions in East and Southeast Asian countries shaped US American national identity. By exploring various archives and Asian American literature she hopes to illuminate how the religious is entangled in the construction of notions like citizenship. She can be found at twitter.com/miheekimkort posting pictures of her kids, dog and cats, and the ocean.
Jordan Lynton
Ph.D. Student, Anthropology
Jordan's research interests include transnationalism, hyphenated identities, immigrant networks, and cultural associations, principally concerning the Chinese Diaspora in the Caribbean. She has spent extensive time in Jamaica conducting fieldwork on Chinese communities and cultural organizations in Kingston. Her dissertation project utilizes ethnographic methodology with geographic spatial analysis in order to consider identity formation and citizenship negotiation in Chinese-Jamaican communities.
Anne Mahady
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies
Anne Mahady is a PhD candidate in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. In her research, she examines questions of the role of the folk within 20th-century discourses on American national identity and racial representation. Her dissertation, entitled Envisioning the American Folk in the Art of Palmer C. Hayden, investigates the ways in which African American modernist Palmer Hayden addressed, replied to and re-framed discourses about "the folk" and folklore in his mid-career works. Her research interests include: 20th-century African American art, folklore and laborlore, American modernisms and curatorial ethics. Her dissertation research on Palmer Hayden was funded by a Travel Grant from the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society (CRRES) at Indiana University and by the Indiana University Graduate School.
Stephanie Nguyen
Ph.D. Student, Higher Education (School of Education, Department of Educational Leadership and Policies)
Stephanie is interested in the intersection between organizational theory, sociology of education, history of education, as well as race and ethnicity. She is currently working on her dissertation that examines the organizational history of how Asian American Studies programs are created and established at Midwest research institutions.
Daniel Runnels
Ph.D. Student, Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Daniel’s research interests include literature, political thought, and indigeneity in Latin America, with a special focus on Bolivia and the Andes Mountain region. His interests are interdisciplinary, having primarily studied 20th-21st century literary and cultural production related to the nation and indigenous inclusion, and he is currently developing a new interest in architecture, space, and race.
Meaghan Rysdale
Ph.D. Student, Department of Political Science
Meaghan is interested in racial and ethnic politics and the role of inequality in political agendas and class systems. Her previous research has looked at how class in the US compares to that of the UK while her current research explores the relationship between police budgets and police related fatal encounters. As a former McNair scholar, her hope is to bring attention to the growing inequality gap in the United States and the need to revisit policy initiatives to address issues of inequality.
Donovan A. Watts
Ph.D. Student, Department of Political Science
Donovan A. Watts is a PhD student in the IU Department of Political Science. Watts’ research interests involve racial and ethnic politics, political behavior, and political participation in the United States. At present, he is studying how cases of police violence toward African Americans impact political behavior and political participation among African American millennials. In addition, Watts is the recipient to numerous awards and fellowships highlighted by his 2017 APSA Minority Fellow selection.
Ting-Han Chang
Ph.D. Student, Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies
Ting-Han's research interests focus on equity-based research in higher education, including race and racism in higher education, organizational change and institutional equity, and college student leadership for social justice. Her dissertation utilizes the critical qualitative methodology to examine the ways undergraduate student leaders of color conceptualize racial justice leadership.
Michael C. Montesano
Ph.D. Student, Department of Comparative Literature
Michael studies literary representations of systemic inequalities in West Africa and the Americas. He is most interested in creative practices that subvert and defy the violence of racial regimes in today’s capitalist societies. His dissertation focuses on literatures of Nigeria, Peru, and the United States. The study investigates the common tropes that authors use to critique injustice at the same time that it showcases the life-affirming visions and alternative futures that some artists make possible in their works.
Ani Abrahamyan
Ph.D. Student, Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures
Ani’s work centers on representations of imperial minorities in nineteenth-century Russian literature. Treating fictional ethnography as a narrative technique, she explores the aesthetic, ethical, and political implications of granting a voice to gendered, religious, and ethnic Others. Her current research examines the narrative miscommunications and exclusions that result from the use of dialects and foreign languages in Russian fiction.
Anna E. Acosta Russian
Ph.D. Student, Department of Sociology
Anna's research lies at the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race. Using the case study of former college athletes transitioning to adulthood, her dissertation critically interrogates how race permits some respondents (e.g. white women) and not others to transgress gender and sexuality norms once they leave the context of college athletics. Another strand of research focuses on understanding stereotypes surrounding Asians and Asian-Americans in the United States through experimental methods.
Nelson O. O. Zounlome
Ph.D. Student, Department of Counseling Psychology
Nelson O. O. Zounlome, M.S.Ed., is a McNair Scholar, NASEM/Ford Foundation Fellow, Herman B. Wells Graduate Fellow, and counseling psychology doctoral candidate at Indiana University and current Doctoral Clinical Intern at the University of Maryland – College Park Counseling Center. His program of research focuses on examining the impact of intersectional oppression on groups with marginalized identities. Within this framework, he studies academic persistence, mental wellness, and sexual violence prevention to promote holistic healing among Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC).
Christen Priddie
Ph.D. Student, Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies
Christen’s research interests include how diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts appear in undergraduate and graduate student Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) contexts for Black students. She also specifically examines the intersectional experiences of Black women undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty in higher education. Her dissertation aims to examine culturally relevant collaborative learning experiences of Black students.
Teeka Gray
Ph.D. Student, Department of Anthropology
Teeka’s research focuses on African Americans in Japan and the ways they navigate transnational subjecthood, old and new minority statuses, and racisms derived from the United States and Japan. Her current research connects to her broader interests in AfroAsian interactions and history. Her dissertation research uses ethnographic methods and social network analysis, as well as drawing upon multimedia resources. Teeka has been the recipient of an NSF-East Asian and Pacific Summer Institute Fellowship, as well as a Fulbright Fellowship.
Jazma Sutton
Ph.D. Student, Department of History
Jazma earned a B.A. in Africana Studies and History at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, a M.A. in U.S. History at Indiana University and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in U.S. History with a minor in Gender Studies at IUB. Her dissertation explores the origins and development of Indiana’s rural free black communities, the gendered experiences of freedom, and free and self-liberated black women’s roles in the Underground Railroad. Jazma recently led a CRRES sponsored History Harvest involving descendants of the Greenville community she studies in Randolph County, Indiana and Darke County, Ohio and is working to transform their historical artifacts and oral histories into a digital archive.
Nilzimar Vieira
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Nilzimar’s research interests involve African diaspora in literature, cinema, and politics in Brazil, Portugal, and Germany. She is interested in the discussion on race and citizenship through literature and cinema in African diaspora societies. Nilzimar’s research focuses on the development of Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Portuguese literature and cinema. Her primary corpus includes 20th and 21st-century novels and more specifically short-films in Brazil and Portugal. Nilzimar’s dissertation investigates public policies and digital platforms in the development of cinematic productions by women of afro descendent in Brazil and Portugal. Nilzimar has co-taught a course and a study abroad program on race and ethnicity in Rio de Janeiro, and has received numerous teaching awards, research and travel grants.
Paul Levy
MPH Student, Environmental Health
Paul’s research interests include exploring systems level thinking to understand health disparities. He is particularly focused on the intersection of structural bias, systemic racism and environmental justice, and how to empower effected communities to drive meaningful and culturally competent policy change. His current work examines air quality in low-middle income Hispanic households in the US, Mexico, and Ecuador, and its association with negative health outcomes.
Jasmine L. Davis-Randolph
Ph.D. Student, Department of Sociology
Jasmine is a McNair Scholar and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship recipient. Her research interests are racial and ethnic identity, mental health, and social psychology. Jasmine’s research focuses on the impact of discrimination, trauma, and stigma on the well-being of marginalized communities. Additionally, she is interested in how race and ethnicity shape social interactions and its impact on the production and dissemination of policies. In previous research, she explored the impact of Black ethnic identity on self-esteem across time for both native-born Blacks and Black immigrants from the Caribbean.
James Watkins
Ph.D. Student, Department of Sociology
James earned a B.A. in Sociology from the University of Pittsburgh in 2019 before beginning his graduate work at IU. His research focuses on how immigrants and refugees adapt to new cultural contexts through social structures, as well as the generational conflicts found within immigrant families caused by the influx of unfamiliar social customs. His current projects also concern the social construction of anti-immigrant attitudes, and the utilization of these attitudes by political figures.
Pamela Hong
Ph.D. Student, Department of Sociology
Pam is a Graduate Scholars Fellow at IU. She researches topics on race/immigration, social psychology, and social movements/networks. Her current research utilizes racialization theory to explore how Asian and Latino immigrants are criminalized in the media. She also has work on how intergroup contact can influence participation and support for the Black Lives Matter movement. Her other research involves online racism and how digital spaces are used to perpetuate these ideologies, attitudes, and racist behavior.
Muna Adem
Ph.D. Student, Department of Sociology
Muna Adem is a graduate student in the Sociology program. She earned her MS in Applied Statistic in 2019. Her interests include race and ethnicity, immigration and quantitative methods using a cross-national framework. Her current research examines how immigration continues to (re)shape group boundaries in the U.S. (e.g. what makes someone a fellow citizen in contemporary society) and the consequences of social integration and "diverse" settings for ethnic and racial minorities in Europe.
Yael R. Rosenstock Gonzalez
Ph.D. Student, Health Behavior (School of Public Health)
Yael’s focuses on diversity and inclusivity in work centered around consent, desire, pleasure, embodiment, and partnering styles. Her current research focuses on Latinas of different perceived racial identities and their experiences of fetishization and sexual desire. She seeks to influence interventions that prevent sexual violence and promote healthy sexuality as well as adding to knowledge around pleasure, body & group acceptance, and positive sexual experiences in marginalized populations. Yael's preferred epistemology is participatory action research and she prioritizes projects that center knowledge translation of research results back to communities.
J'Mauri Jackson
Ph.D. Student, Department of Sociology
J’Mauri received a B.S. in Psychology from The Ohio State University in 2019 and is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology and a Graduate Scholars Fellow. Her current research interests lie in mental health, medical sociology, and social psychology. In particular, she seeks to implement an intersectional approach to explore mental health outcomes for marginalized populations, as well as examine the implications of misogynoir and colorism on the Self.
Melissa Garcia
Ph.D. Student, Department of Sociology
Melissa’s broad research interests include race and ethnicity, immigration, and higher education. Her work examines the barriers and discrimination Latina immigrant mothers experience, how and why sanctuary-related policies emerge at local and state levels, and the experiences of Asian American and Latinx students’ participation in panethnic student organizations. She aims to examine the experiences of immigrants and children of immigrants from a lens that shifts away from a deficit perspective and instead highlights how immigrants and their children build community and draw on existing social capital.
CRRES Postdoctoral Scholar, 2019-2021
Candace Miller is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. Broadly, her research interests focus on race/ethnicity, urban sociology, and culture. Currently, Candace’s research agenda is driven by an interest in racial inequalities embedded in and stemming from the contemporary urban political economy. She is currently working on a book based on a mixed-methods examination of the disparate experiences and outcomes of Black and white small business owners in the context of contemporary redevelopment efforts in Detroit, Michigan. In addition, she is currently examining how arts organizations are distributed among poor and minority urban neighborhoods, tracing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Black and white business owners’ outcomes, and tracing the exchange of capital between higher- and lower-socioeconomic status neighborhoods in metropolitan Indianapolis, Indiana during the COVID-19 pandemic.
CRRES Postdoctoral Scholar, 2019-2021
Oscar E. Patrón is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Higher Education and Student Affairs program in the School of Education. Oscar received his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh and spent the last two years of his program as a Visiting Scholar and Research Associate at the USC Race and Equity Center at the University of Southern California. His research interests broadly examine the racialized, gendered, and sexualized experiences of Latina/o students in higher education; men of color; student success; and resilience. Oscar's 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. In doing so, he accounts for the role and manifestation of systems of oppression that underlie the adversity encountered by Latino men.
CRRES Postdoctoral Scholar, 2019-2021
Christine Noelle Peralta is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Indiana University. She is a first-generation college student who grew up in Houston, Texas. She received her Ph.D. in History with a minor in Asian American Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (2019). Her research interests are in the fields of U.S. history, empires and imperialism, comparative ethnic studies, gender and women’s studies, and migration. Her book project uses a transnational approach to examine the history of Filipina women’s medical knowledge production during Spanish and U.S. empire. Locating Filipina women’s intellectual labor in unexpected places, she assembles a wide-ranging archive that includes sources from demography, botany, medicine, and native folklore in order to recover women’s stories by carefully examining these sources for traces of their erased knowledge, revealing the multiple interactions women had with colonial medicine. She is also interested in developing decolonial pedagogies for the classroom, collecting comic books, and listening to ghost stories.
CRRES Postdoctoral Scholar, 2020-2022
Chinbo Chong is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Indiana University. She is a first-generation college student who grew up in South Korea, Alaska, Kansas, Washington, and California. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2019). Her main fields of study are in American politics, political behavior, and race and ethnic politics. At CRRES, she will be working on her book manuscript titled Identity Appeals in the Age of Immigration. Her book project uses original survey experiments, large observational political surveys, and qualitative data, which speaks to the discussion about the formation of political identity, how this differs for Asian American and Latino voters, and its impact on mobilizing these two important American electorate. She has also examined how immigrant voters form their party identification, and the role of discrimination and xenophobic rhetoric on their political behavior and collective action.
CRRES Postdoctoral Scholar, 2020-2022
Vivek Vellanki is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society (CRRES) and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction in the School of Education at Indiana University. Vivek earned his PhD in Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education from Michigan State University. His scholarly and artistic work is centered on issues of migration, transnationalism, and youth identity/culture. He draws on visual methodologies and research-creation in order to question the boundaries between scholarly/creative work. Vivek’s dissertation examined the experiences/stories of immigrants and refugees in the U.S. using the photographic medium. He curated an exhibition titled, Do you have anything to declare?, featuring his dissertation work in the fall of 2019. He has worked with teachers and youth in India and the U.S. in exploring the role of the arts and the possibilities for envisioning the classroom as a site for exploration, play, and imagining socially just futures. At CRRES, Vivek’s work explores the relationship between photography, migration, and youth identity/culture through a collaboration with South Asian youth living in the area.
Tennisha Riley
CRRES Postdoctoral Scholar, 2018-2020
Tennisha N. Riley was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University from 2018-2020. Following her fellowship with CRRES, she accepted a position as an Assistant Professor in the School of Education at Indiana University. She received her PhD. In Developmental Psychology from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2018. Her research interests focus on cognitive and emotional processes associated with the development of both risk-related and prosocial behaviors among African American youth. Specifically, she is interested in the degree to which adolescents’ emotion-related physiological responses in particular contexts (i.e., family, peers, school, and community settings) informs decision-making. She received her M.A in Marriage and Family Therapy from LaSalle University in 2009, and subsequently worked as a multi-systemic therapist for adolescents and their families. Her previous work with families and clinical training informs her current research in adolescent development, as well as her interest in translational research and intervention development.
Denia Garcia
CRRES Postdoctoral Scholar, 2017-2020
Denia Garcia was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University from 2017-2020. Following her fellowship with CRRES, she accepted a position as an Assistant Professor of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University in 2017. Her research interests include race/ethnicity, urban sociology, political sociology, and organizations. She is currently working on a book manuscript based on a three-year ethnography of a multiethnic neighborhood in Chicago, which speaks to ongoing debates about the consequences of ethnic/racial diversity for social relations and civic participation. She has also examined how social cues influence the perception of race and skin color, racial attitudes, and social capital among urban families using survey and experimental data.
Vanessa Cruz Nichols
CRRES Postdoctoral Scholar, 2017-2019
Vanessa Cruz Nichols was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society in 2017-19 and accepted a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Indiana University. Her research interests have centered on citizen activism and motivators of political participation with a particular focus on reassessing the hypothesis that threat is the main catalyst that awakens the Latino “sleeping giant.” Instead of potentially exacerbating feelings of helplessness while only emphasizing a sense of urgency (or policy threat), combining these messages with more opportunity-based policy alternatives may be an improved strategy to catalyze a group to rise, and not succumb, to the challenge before them. Vanessa’s dissertation leveraged data from an original bilingual survey experiment and observational survey analyses from the American National Election Study. To build on her dissertation work, Vanessa is conducting mobilizer interviews and analyzing data from a second survey experiment, which delves into the causal mechanisms of fear and hope. Vanessa’s book project is tentatively titled “Latinos Rising to the Challenge: Political Responses to Peril and Promise.”
CRRES Postdoctoral Scholar, 2016-2018
Dorainne Green was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University from 2016-2018. Following her fellowship with CRRES, she accepted a position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University. She received her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Northwestern University in 2016. Her research explores the pathways through which stigma-related stressors contribute to disparities in education and health between socially advantaged and socially disadvantaged individuals. A primary interest is the identification of strategies to help stigmatized individuals manage the challenges of navigating diverse spaces, including those with the potential to expose them to stigma-related stressors.
Adam Bledsoe
CRRES Postdoctoral Scholar, 2016-2017
Adam Bledsoe was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society during the 2016-2017 academic year. Following his fellowship with CRRES, he accepted a tenure-track position as an Assistant Professor of Geography and African American Studies at Florida State University. His research focuses on racialization, social movements, and struggle in the context of the African Diaspora, drawing on participatory research, archival work, and critical theory to examine the historical and contemporary struggles of Black communities in Salvador, Brazil, as they seek to defend their territories from a series of land grabs. He is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Defending Our Piece of Ground: The Quilombos of the Bay of Aratu.
Tristan Ivory
CRRES Postdoctoral Scholar, 2015-2017
Tristan Ivory served as a Postdoctoral Fellow with CRRES from 2015-2017, and is now in a tenure-track position as an Assistant Professor in the Industrial and Labor Relations School at Cornell University. Tristan’s areas of specialization include international migration, race and ethnicity, inequality, and transnationalism, and he utilizes ethnographic observation, interviews, contemporary news accounts, and archival data to examine the resources and strategies that Sub-Saharan African migrants use to try to maximize social and economic outcomes in the Tokyo Metropolitan Region. He is currently working on his first book project, tentatively titled Greener Pastures: Sub-Saharan Africans and the Pursuit of Social Mobility in Japan.
Hyeyoung Kwon
CRRES Postdoctoral Scholar, 2015-2017
Hyeyoung Kwon received her Ph.D. in Sociology from University of Southern California. Following her Postdoctoral Fellowship with CRRES (2015-2017), she accepted a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research focuses on immigration, comparative race/ethnicity, social inequality, and family. Drawing from in-depth interviews and ethnographic data, she is currently writing her book manuscript, tentatively titled, Translating Race, Class, and Immigrant Lives, which examines the daily lives of Mexican- and Korean-American “language brokers” who use their bilingual skills to navigate English-speaking institutions for their immigrant parents. In a socio-historical moment where immigrants of color are depicted as threats to the economic stability of “true” Americans, her work seeks to expose the contradictions between the ideal of equality and the actual practices of race, class, and language-based exclusion. Her publications appear in Social Problems, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and Childhood.
Sean Everette Gantt
CRRES Postdoctoral Scholar, 2014-2016
Sean Everette Gantt earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of New Mexico before joining CRRES as a Postdoctoral Fellow in 2014. Following his CRRES Fellowship, Sean accepted a position as Assistant Director of Education at Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez, CO. Sean is a visual and public anthropologist with training in archaeology and ethnography, specializing in Southeastern U.S. Native American Studies and focusing on economic development, indigenous self-representation, and identity. His dissertation, entitled “Nanta Hosh Chahta Immi? (What are Choctaw Ways?): Cultural Preservation in the Casino Era,” investigates the long-term impacts of tribal economic development programs on the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians reservation in East-Central Mississippi.
Diana Martha Louis
CRRES Postdoctoral Scholar, 2014-2016
Diana Martha Louis received her Ph.D. in English from Emory University in July 2014. Following her Postdoctoral Fellowship with CRRES, she accepted a tenure-track position as an Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and American Culture at the University of Michigan. Her research pursues the intersections of Disability Studies and Critical Race Studies with respect to issues of mental illness in African American life. Her current project, The Colored Insane: Slavery, Asylums and Mental Illness in 19th-Century America, examines the impact of major transformations in both American psychiatry and African Americans’ social condition—the end of one of America’s prototypical institutions of confinement and the expansion of another, slavery and asylums, respectively.
Nicole Ivy
CRRES Postdoctoral Scholar, 2013-2015
Following the conclusion of her Postdoctoral Fellowship with CRRES, Nicole became an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Public Fellow in Washington, D.C., where she also worked as a Futurist with the Center for the Future of Museums. In this her unique role as a Futurist with a formation in History, Nicole collaborated with museums, educators, and researchers to innovate museum practice and conducts research on the history of labor organizing in the nonprofit sector. She is now an Assistant Professor in American Studies at George Washington University. Her scholarly work focuses on racial formations, memory, and the labor of representation.
Julie Lee Merseth
CRRES Postdoctoral Scholar, 2013-2015
Julie Lee Merseth received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 2013. After finishing her Postdoctoral Fellowship with CRRES in 2015, she accepted a tenure-track position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University. Her areas of specialization are situated in the field of American politics with a dual and overlapping focus on race and immigration. Her research is especially animated by questions of how racial and ethnic politics in the United States are changing as a result of fast-growing populations of immigrants, largely from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Her current book project, tentatively titled, Beyond Panethnicity: Immigration and the Challenges of Racial Solidarity, investigates the potential and pitfalls of forging a race-based political solidarity among Asian Americans and Latinos.
Aaron Ponce
Aaron is Assistant Professor of sociology at Michigan State University. His research draws on the sociology of immigration and global migration, political sociology, and race and ethnicity. Aaron's work investigates how overlapping symbolic boundaries (race, gender, religion) constitute citizenship and national ways of belonging in immigrant-receiving societies. Much of his recent work has focused on immigration to Europe, and on the reception and perception of Muslim immigrant populations. His current work compares the Muslim experience in Europe and the U.S., and examines Muslim Americans' and other immigrant-background groups' status in a historically racialized landscape. Among the questions that his research has answered are: Do more accommodating modes of belonging increase migration? How do racial hierarchies define which groups are perceived as assimilable or desirable? How do seemingly discrete social categories (religion, gender) become racialized in processes of group boundary making? Findings from his research speak to the contradictions inherent in immigration regimes, immigrant reception processes, and the norms that define and reinforce liberal democracies.
Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society
Schuessler Institute for Social Research
1022 E. 3rd St., Room 209,
Bloomington, IN 47405
812-855-8016
Office Hours: Monday - Friday: 10:00 am – 2:00 pm
