People

Directors

Sylvia Martinez

Director

Email:
symartin@indiana.edu

Sylvia Martinez is an Associate Professor in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies and the Latino Studies program at Indiana University. Her research focuses on Latino/a ethnic identity, Latino/a education, and sociology of education issues more generally.

Sonia Lee

Associate Director

Email:
soslee@iu.edu

Sonia Lee is an Associate Professor of American Studies and Latinx Studies at Indiana University. Her research interests include the civil rights and Black Power movements, Black-Brown solidarities, constructions of race and ethnicity, mental health, substance abuse, trauma and practices of healing within freedom movements.

Staff

Jessica Smith

CRRES Administrative Assistant

Email:
crres@indiana.edu

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.

Melissa Garcia

CRRES Graduate Research Assistant

Email:
melgarc@iu.edu

Melissa Garcia is a Ph.D. student in the Sociology Department. She earned her M.A. in Sociology from the University of Memphis in 2017 and her B.A. in International Studies with a disciplinary major in Anthropology from Southwestern University. Her research interests include race and ethnicity, immigration, and higher education. At CRRES, Melissa is responsible for managing communications such as the weekly email blast, and social media, while also offering general assistance for the Center's programming.

Dasha Carver

CRRES Graduate Research Assistant

Dasha is a Ph.D. student in Counseling Psychology. She earned her M.A. in Couples and Family Therapy from Saint Louis University School of Medicine in 2021 and her B.A. in Psychology with minors in Creative Writing and British Literature from the University of Missouri St. Louis. Her research interests include social justice advocacy through sexuality, sexual health, racial identity, and relationship outcomes among couples, non-monogamous, and interracial partnerships. Dasha also uses intersectionality, critical race, attachment, and feminist theory as guiding frameworks for her research interests.

Anna Sarpong

CRRES Social Media and Outreach Intern

Anna Sarpong is a freshman studying Neuroscience at Indiana University. As the Social Media Outreach undergraduate intern, her role at CRRES is to provide valuable content through our social media platforms and reach IU undergraduate communities. Her research interest is on implicit bias, cognition, and decision-making and the role these concepts have on racial perspectives. Anna is a proud Peer Coach as a Cox Exploratory Scholar as well as a Hudson and Holland Scholar.

Faculty Affiliates

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

Faye Gleisser

Assistant 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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).

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.

Graduate Affiliates

Ryan J. Davis

Ph.D. Student, Higher Education (School of Education)

Email:
ryjdavis@indiana.edu

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.

Monica Heilman

Ph.D. Student, Department of Sociology

Email:
mlheilma@iu.edu

Monica’s research interests include multiracial identity, whiteness, and qualitative methods. She is also an artist who incorporates arts-based research into her scholarship. Monica’s dissertation examines how multiracial individuals identify, how self-identification varies by context, and how (multi)racial identities are shaped under whiteness as not only a racial category but a system of power.

Mihee Kim-Kort

Ph.D. Student, Religious Studies

Email:
rkimkort@iu.edu

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.

Stephanie Nguyen

Ph.D. Student, Higher Education (School of Education, Department of Educational Leadership and Policies)

Email:
stenguye@indiana.edu

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.

Ting-Han Chang

Ph.D. Student, Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies

Email:
tc25@indiana.edu

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.

Ani Abrahamyan

Ph.D. Student, Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures

Email:
aniabrah@iu.edu

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.

Christen Priddie

Ph.D. Student, Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies

Email:
cpriddie@iu.edu

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

Email:
grayle@indiana.edu

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. 

Nilzimar Vieira

Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Email:
nhauskre@indiana.edu

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. 

Jasmine L. Davis-Randolph

Ph.D. Student, Department of Sociology

Email:
jld8@iu.edu

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.  

Pamela Hong

Ph.D. Student, Department of Sociology

Email:
pamhong@iu.edu

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.

Yael R. Rosenstock Gonzalez

Ph.D. Student, Health Behavior (School of Public Health)

Email:
yrosens@iu.edu

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.

Melissa Garcia

Ph.D. Student, Department of Sociology

Email:
melgarc@iu.edu

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.

Tania Nasrollahi

Ph.D. Student, Department of Sociology

Email:
tnasroll@iu.edu

Tania Nasrollahi is a sociology Ph.D. student at Indiana University-Bloomington, where she studies how social forces impact individuals when they adopt identity categories. Broadly, her research interests include cultural sociology, sociological theory, and ethnographic methods. More specifically, she researches the impacts of categorization systems on identity formation, negotiation, and contestation. She previously graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, where her research was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon and Robert Lemelson Foundations.

Travis Wright

Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History

Email:
wrighttr@iu.edu

Travis Wright is a Ph.D. student studying modern U.S. history. His areas of research include 20th century African American history, social movements, community activism, and student protest. His work centers issues of race and ethnicity, culture, citizenship, and social and political organizing – particularly during the Progressive Era and post-WWII period. Travis is originally from Cleveland, Ohio, and earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degree in History from Bowling Green State University. His M.A. thesis, “The Chicago Area Friends of SNCC, the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations, and the Chicago Struggle for Freedom During the 1960s,” examined the role of SNCC and student activism in the Chicago Freedom Movement. His most recent publication “Social Media and Continuity in the Black Freedom Struggle,” analyzes the relationship between visual culture and Black protest. Travis has instructed courses in both modern U.S. and modern world history. He is currently an editorial assistant for the Journal of American History.

Sam Smucker

Ph.D. Student, The Media School

Email:
sajsmuck@iu.edu

Sam’s research concerns African American film history and its international connections. His dissertation research is an investigation of director and author Melvin Van Peebles’s creative works during the years he lived in Paris, 1960-1968. Sam is interested in artistic practices and aesthetics viewed through their historical and political contexts. He previously worked as a union organizer and in film distribution.

Jonathan Kang

Ph.D. Student, Department of Counseling Psychology

Email:
jonkang@iu.edu

Jonathan is a doctoral student in the Counseling Psychology program. He is interested in conducting basic and applied psychology research related to both implicit and explicit disturbances in identity formation, morality development, and sociomoral reasoning of those who are excessively privileged by the cultural hegemony of oppressive societies.

Elizabeth Spaeth

Ph.D. Student, Department of History

Email:
espaeth@iu.edu

Lizzy is a Ph.D. student in United States History researching international students, migration, and social history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Originally from Philadelphia, she earned her Bachelor of Arts in International Affairs and Anthropology at The George Washington University. She taught abroad for several years in the Federated States of Micronesia, Mexico, and the Philippines. In 2017, she received her M.A. from the University of Chicago’s Program in the Social Sciences with a thesis centered on the visual representation of race and violence in the Philippine-American War. She then taught special education in Chicago’s Roseland neighborhood for two years while studying for a Master of Arts in Teaching Special Education. She is in her third year of IU’s Ph.D. program in U.S. History. She has assisted in teaching courses related to U.S. and the world and introduction to U.S. history at IU. She is currently an editorial assistant at the Journal of American History.

Da Eun Jung

Ph.D. Student, Department of Sociology

Email:
dj85@iu.edu

Da Eun’s broad research interests include race and ethnicity and legal institutions and mechanisms. She is particularly interested in understanding Asian and Asian Americans’ experiences with the criminal justice system.

Tiffanie Vo

Ph.D. Student, Department of Sociology

Email:
tivo@iu.edu

Tiffanie Vo is currently a PhD student in the Department of Sociology. She earned her MA in Sociology in 2022 at the University of Oklahoma. Her broad research interests include race and ethnicity, Asian American studies, inequality, social movements, and mixed methods. Her current research examines how race and ethnicity continue to shape economic disparities in the US labor market and how the intersection of race, gender, and family impacts these processes using large-scale data.

Dasha Carver

Ph.D. Student, Department of Counseling Psychology

Email:
dashcarv@iu.edu

Dasha is a Ph.D. student in Counseling Psychology. She earned her M.A. in Couples and Family Therapy from Saint Louis University School of Medicine in 2021 and her B.A. in Psychology with minors in Creative Writing and British Literature from the University of Missouri St. Louis. Her research interests include social justice advocacy through sexuality, sexual health, racial identity, and relationship outcomes among couples, non-monogamous, and interracial partnerships. Dasha also uses intersectionality, critical race, attachment, and feminist theory as guiding frameworks for her research interests.

Lisa Doi

Ph.D. Candidate, Department of American Studies

Email:
edoi@iu.edu

Lisa Doi’s research focuses on memory and memorialization of Japanese American World War II incarceration. Her dissertation project is an ethnographic engagement with Japanese American pilgrimages to World War II incarceration sites. Lisa’s work is highly engaged, bridging her academic work with co-chairing Tsuru for Solidarity, a collective of progressive Japanese Americans engaged in abolitionist and racial healing work. Together, these interests allow Lisa to both theorize and practice a Japanese American politic that is rooted in history but that is also aspiring towards a more capacious future. Lisa is also a curatorial assistant at the Japanese American National Museum, the President of the Japanese American Citizens League Chicago, and a 2021-2023 Sacred Journey Fellow with Interfaith America.

Alleluia Musabyimana

Ph.D. Student, Department of Sociology

Email:
amusabyi@iu.edu

Alleluia's research interests include topics on race and ethnicity, work and organizations, and social psychology. Her studies are driven by how social institutions create and maintain inequities. Currently her work examines the perceptions and attitudes about diversity programs, with a particular focus on the experiences of Black workers.

Jacqueline Y. Paiz

Ph.D. Student, Department of Counseling Psychology

Email:
jypaiz@iu.edu

Jackie is a Ph.D. student in Counseling Psychology. She earned her M.S.Ed. in Learning and Developmental Sciences (Counseling Psychology Track) en route to her PhD in 2023 and her B.A. in Psychology and Spanish with a minor in Latin American Latinx Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN. Her research interests include attitudes toward seeking psychotherapy, social determinants of mental health, and intergenerational trauma among people of color through a health equity lens. Jackie uses intersectionality, critical race, and feminist theory as guiding frameworks for her research interests and her clinical work.

Current Postdocs

CRRES Postdoctoral Scholar, 2023-2025

Joseph Wei is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Indiana University. He received his PhD from the University of Virginia, and his scholarly interests include Asian American literature, critical refugee studies, literature and sociology, and oral history. As a CRRES fellow, he will primarily be working on a book manuscript titled Refugee Poetics, which draws on oral history alongside textual analysis to examine the poetry and literary organizations made by 1.5- and second-generation Vietnamese, Hmong, Lao, and Cambodian American poets. He is also creating an oral history archive of Asian American poets from the 1970s to the present with support from the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. 

CRRES Postdoctoral Scholar, 2022-2024

Email:
oekeh@iu.edu

Olivia Ekeh is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. She received her Ph.D. in Afro-American Studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Broadly, her research centers on 20th Century Black history, music, and popular culture. At CRRES she will be working on a book manuscript focusing on the historical and aesthetic significance of the soul era from the mid 20th Century on the larger Black music tradition. Using historical methods combined with literary criticism and analysis, music and performance studies, the project explores the importance of quotidian or experiences of the everyday on music from the soul era of the 20th Century on post-soul and contemporary Black musicians. Her archival research is heavily indebted to the Archives of African American Music and Culture (AAAMC) supporting her endeavor to broaden the sphere of soul music’s historical legacy beyond the exclusive scope of the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power.

Past Postdocs

Min Joo Lee

CRRES Postdoctoral Scholar, 2022-2023

Min Joo Lee was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Indiana University. Following her fellowship with CRRES, Min Joo accepted a position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian Studies at Occidental College. Min Joo received her Ph.D. in Gender Studies from University of California, Los Angeles. Prior to coming to Indiana University, she worked as a Visiting Lecturer at Wellesley College. Her research is positioned at the intersection of Asian Studies, Gender Studies, and Media Studies. Min Joo's first book project, tentatively titled Finding Mr. Perfect: Korean Television Dramas, Romance, and Race, examines the gendered and racial politics of the transnational popularity of Korean popular culture. Her second book-length research project, tentatively titled Digital Rape: Illicit Pornography, Sexual Consent, and Race, analyzes the transnational dissemination of illegal and non-consensual Korean sex videos to examine how digital media have generated new forms of sexual and racial violence.

Aleshia Barajas

CRRES Postdoctoral Scholar, 2021-2023

Email:
alebara@iu.edu

Aleshia Barajas was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the American Studies Department at Indiana University. Following her fellowship with CRRES, Aleshia accepted a position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies at Indiana University. She received her PhD from Yale University and is currently working on a book manuscript introducing an other-than-linear conceptual framework that challenges our current binary—here or there—understanding of the US-Mexico border and quotidian border-crossings. This work is based on three years of ethnographic field research at four ports of entry in Baja California/California and Sonora/Arizona, as well as her own personal experience crossing the border every day to attend school in the US. Her research has been generously supported by the Ford Foundation.

Juan Mora

CRRES Postdoctoral Scholar, 2021-2023

Email:
jimora@iu.edu

Juan Ignacio Mora was 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. Following his fellowship with CRRES, Juan accepted a position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Indiana University. Although he has spent time living in San Antonio, Texas and Mexico City, he is a committed Midwesterner who has spent the majority of his life in Chicago and Champaign, Illinois. Juan received his PhD in History with a minor in Latina/o Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2021). He is a historian of Latinxs, race, labor, and popular culture whose work questions the meaning of foodways, migration, and citizenship in the modern United States. As a CRRES Postdoctoral Fellow, he was primarily working on his book manuscript titled Latino Encounters: Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and Puerto Ricans in Michigan, 1929-1971. Drawing on multi-lingual research in U.S., Mexican, and Puerto Rican archives, his book examines three groups of Latina/o/xs as they forged national and transnational networks through postwar migration and agricultural labor.

Chinbo Chong

CRRES Postdoctoral Scholar, 2020-2023

Email:
chchon@iu.edu

Chinbo Chong was 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. Following her fellowship with CRRES, Chinbo accepted a position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Asian American Studies at Northeastern 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 was 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.

Vivek Vellanki

CRRES Postdoctoral Scholar, 2020-2022

Email:
vvellan@iu.edu

Vivek Vellanki was 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. Following his fellowship with CRRES, Vivek accepted a position as an Assistant Professor in the School of Education.  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 explored the relationship between photography, migration, and youth identity/culture through a collaboration with South Asian youth living in the area.

Candace Miller

CRRES Postdoctoral Scholar, 2019-2021

Candace Miller was 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. Following her fellowship with CRRES, Candace accepted a position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology with the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. 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.

Oscar Patrón

CRRES Postdoctoral Scholar, 2019-2021

Email:
opatron@iu.edu

Oscar E. Patrón was 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. Following his fellowship with CRRES, he accepted a position as an Assistant Professor in the School of Education at Indiana University. 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.

Christine Peralta

CRRES Postdoctoral Scholar, 2019-2021

Christine Noelle Peralta was 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. Following her fellowship with CRRES, Christine accepted a position as an Assistant Professor of History and Sexuality, Women's and Gender Studies at Amherst College. 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.

Tennisha Riley

CRRES Postdoctoral Scholar, 2018-2020

Email:
rileytn@iu.edu

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

Email:
vcruznic@iu.edu

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.”

Dorainne Green

CRRES Postdoctoral Scholar, 2016-2018

Email:
dojlevy@indiana.edu

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

Website:
https://seangantt.wordpress.com/

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.

Visiting Scholars

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