An Introduction to CRRES
The Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society (CRRES) at Indiana University in Bloomington is an interdisciplinary academic research center. CRRES continues to welcome and connect scholars of race and ethnicity, maintaining the thriving and vibrant intellectual community at the front line of timely and vital research. Learn more about CRRES's impact in the video below, featuring our Directors and affiliates.
A Message from the Directors
June 2024
Dear CRRES Friends and Colleagues,
We write to you at the end of another academic year. We started the year on a high note, celebrating the Center’s 10th anniversary over a two-day period. The celebration was a homecoming of sorts where former directors and associate directors, and CRRES postdoctoral scholars gathered in community. We welcomed Dr. Quincy Stewart, former IU faculty and chair of the Social Science Diversity Initiative, the working group responsible for creating the mission for CRRES. We celebrated Dr. Dina Okamoto and Dr. Michelle Moyd, who brought that mission to life for eight years.
Throughout the academic year, CRRES upheld our tradition of sponsoring robust programming and campus engagement through a Speaker Series which largely focused on highlighting the work of IU postdoctoral fellow, CRRES graduate student affiliate, and faculty, such as Dr. Joseph Wei (English), Justin Hawkins (History), Dr. Stephanie Allen (Gender Studies), Dr. Alberto Ortega (School of Public Health), and visiting scholar from Brazil, Paulo Ramos. We also co-sponsored a number of high-profile events such as the AfroLatiné Film and Performance Festival (Latino Studies Program) and the Race and Health Symposium (Sociology).
Our annual Research Symposium featured outside speaker Dr. Reynaldo Morales (Northwestern University), who shared his work on rights-based approaches to global indigeneity. As always, the symposium showcased the incredible research done by student researchers and faculty participating in the CRRES Undergraduate Research Program. Further, Dr. Sonia Lee and Dasha Carver’s recruitment efforts throughout the year paid off as we anticipate 12 mentor/mentee pairs participating in the Undergraduate Research program next year!
This year we experimented with social hours on Thursday evenings instead of coffee hours on the first Fridays of the month. Based on faculty and student attendance, we will continue the Thursday evening tradition.
The spring semester brought more challenging times. As we anticipated, anti-CRT legislation passed through the Indiana legislature in March. Specifically, Indiana State Bill (SB) 202 was signed into law. It is a bill that is designed to increase “intellectual diversity” in higher education in theory, but in reality, it will stifle academic discussions related to historical and contemporary racism. The bill prohibits faculty searches from requesting statements on diversity, equity, or inclusion, and sends a clear message against these educational values. Many faculty are feeling vulnerable with the passing of this law, but we want to acknowledge that this is particularly the case for our pre-tenured faculty members. Despite this, CRRES will remain steadfast in our commitment to studying race and ethnicity and support our faculty and students.
Our hearts are heavy as we close the academic year with the grave uncertainties shaping our relationship with the IU administration. We are still processing the terror we experienced as we witnessed and came into direct contact with the Indiana State Police, who brutalized and arrested unarmed students and faculty holding a peaceful rally at Dunn Meadow in April of this year. We continue to demand that the campus bans imposed upon the students and faculty arrested at Dunn Meadow be lifted. We will not rest until shared governance, clearer lines of communication, and accountability are established between IU administration and the rest of our campus community. We refuse to remain silent about the ongoing genocide in Gaza. We stand with our Palestinian brothers and sisters, and we commit to study, struggle, and organize to promote the full liberation of Palestinians.
We invite you to read this newsletter for a snapshot of what the Center and our affiliates have accomplished this year.
Sylvia Martinez, CRRES Director
Sonia Lee, CRRES Associate Director
CRRES Ten Year Anniversary Celebration
The Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society (CRRES) celebrated its 10th anniversary in the fall of 2023—ten years of rich, invigorating, and intellectually grounded scholarship on race and ethnicity at Indiana University Bloomington!
We are so grateful and proud of the work we have done by strengthening research on race and ethnicity, building interdisciplinary networks, and building communities among faculty and students on our campus.
We celebrated our accomplishments in a two-day event starting with a keynote speech given by one of the founding members of CRRES, Dr. Quincy Stewart. On the second day, we had lightning talks by our former post-docs and reflections by former directors. Then it was time to CELEBRATE in a final gathering with affiliates and friends of CRRES.
Day One | Keynote Speaker: Dr. Quincy Stewart
To kick off our two-day, 10th-anniversary celebration, we welcomed Dr. Quincy Stewart, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University, to kick off our anniversary celebration and speaker series. He provided a synopsis of his recently published book, Race in the Machine: A Novel Account. In the book, the protagonist, an enigmatic mechanic living in a population of socially connected intelligent machines, attempts to build a logical model that answers a simple query they encounter in an introductory lecture: “What exactly is race? And what is it in the context of the social machine?” This prompt guides the protagonist along a twisting intellectual tale surrounding a series of computational experiments that explore: How many racists does it take to create systems of inequality? What role do non-racists actors play in upholding them? How is bias learned? How does it spread?
Day Two | Panels featuring former Post-docs and Directors
The second day felt like a homecoming reunion as former Postdocs presented lightning talks about their experience with CRRES, the impact of CRRES on their careers, and their strategies for thriving in academia. Former Director Dina Okamoto and Associate Director, Michelle Moyd reflected on CRRES and it's importance at IU.
After a full day of panels, it was time to celebrate at The Mill! Our very own CRRES Postdoc, Olivia Ekeh, provided the beats to celebrate a whole decade of CRRES.
Speaker Series
Justin Hawkins
Graduate Student and 2022 Graduate Student Research Grant (GSRG) recipient, Department of History, Indiana University
"Incendiary City: Arson in Charleston from Revolution to Reconstruction"
In the fall, Justin Hawkins presented on his ongoing dissertation research about the use of arson as a weapon of resistance, a tool of repression, and a justification of punishment in Charleston, South Carolina during the Civil War.
Joseph Wei
CRRES Postdoctoral Scholar, Department of English, Indiana University
"A “Kundiman Generation”? Networking Asian American Literary Orgs in the 21st Century"
We started the spring semester with a talk by Joseph Wei, who shared his research on the relationships between literary organizations and Asian American poets in the 21st century. He introduced his oral history archive to focus on Kudiman, a literary non-profit organization. This innovative approach provides an understanding of organizations' role as mediating institutions between minority writers and publishers and MFA programs.
Stephanie Allen
Assistant Professor, Department of Gender Studies, Indiana University
"Writin’ is Fightin’: Black Lesbian Literary Beginnings"
Stephanie Allen presented an overview of her book project, "We Must Document Ourselves Now: Black Lesbian Cultural Legacies and the Politics of Self-Representation." In her project, she draws on Black lesbian literature, film, and visual media to lay bare the experiences of Black lesbians in a raced, gendered, classed, and homophobic society.
Paulo Ramos
CRRES Visiting Scholar, São Paulo’s Catholic University
"Bodies of Water: Landscapes of Afro-Brazilian Women in São Paulo"
To welcome our Visiting Scholar to the CRRES community, Paulo Ramos presented a paper based on his dissertation research. His research combines ethnography, self-ethnography, and cartography to examine the social dynamics shaping the contemporary environmental landscape in São Paulo, Brazil.
Alberto Ortega
Assistant Professor, School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University
"The Impact of Affirmative Action Litigation on Police Killings of Civilians"
We closed out this year’s Speaker Series with Assistant Professor Alberto Ortega, who presented his research on the impact of workforce diversity, or lack thereof, on police violence against civilians. Ortega’s work uses an event-study framework analysis and finds that the threat of affirmative action litigation reduces police killings and lower arrest rates for non-White civilians in more diverse police departments. Findings demonstrate the vital role of federal interventions in addressing police behavior and the use of lethal force.
Co-Sponsored Events
Every year, CRRES collaborates with several units across campus, facilitating interdisciplinary spaces and intellectual exchange with scholars.
UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH PROGRAM (URP)
The CRRES Undergraduate Research Program (URP) is designed for students to gain hands-on experience on a research project or other type of scholarly activity under the mentorship of a faculty member. View the video below to learn more about URP from Dasha Carver, along with current and former URP students.
I have greatly enjoyed being a part of the CRRES URP program. The research training and support that the undergraduates receive through CRRES is phenomenal and the students research some urgent topics. At the symposium this year I was impressed by how students are thinking about creating their own research agendas that they are taking into their future studies, at IU and beyond, as well as their careers. – Vivek Vellanki, Faculty Mentor
CRRES RESEARCH SYMPOSIUM
Every year, CRRES hosts an interdisciplinary symposium that highlights race and ethnicity research being done by graduate students and undergraduate students from our Undergraduate Research Program (URP). This year's two-day symposium featured keynote speaker Dr. Reynaldo Morales, an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University.
Keynote Speaker
Dr. Reynaldo Morales
Assistant Professor, Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications, and Buffett Institute for Global Affairs
"Rights-Based Approaches to Global Indigeneity: Solutions and Stories of our Time"
Reynaldo Morales shared a trailer of his award-winning documentary, "The Flyback: Restoring Territorial Rights in the Ucayali Basin." He presented about his extensive experiences with Indigenous groups around the world and advocated for scholars to engage in a multidisciplinary approach for future research on Indigenous Peoples.
Graduate Student Panel Presentations
On the second day, there were 7 interdisciplinary graduate student research panels moderated by CRRES affiliates. We had 19 graduate student participants representing a wide range of departments, including American Studies, Counseling and Educational Psychology, and Spanish and Portuguese.
CRRES has always offered some of the most exciting and theoretically innovative programming on campus. Even though I haven't been an affiliate for very long, I've benefitted from the many talks I've attended like the research symposium, which always offers one of the most welcoming spaces to present ongoing research on campus.” -Mallika Khanna, Graduate Affiliate, The Media School
“I was able to present at the CRRES symposium on my proposed dissertation and the questions from the audience were very helpful in addressing some possible gaps and other areas of interest within my dissertation topic.” - Jacqueline Paíz, Counseling and Educational Psychology
Undergraduate Poster Presentations
After a morning of graduate student panels, students from the Undergraduate Research Program presented findings from the research they conducted with the guidance of their faculty mentors. This year's projects covered a range of topics, from a media analysis of the legacy of Brown vs. Board of Education to emotional co-regulation during discussions of race in romantic relationships
GRANT AWARDEES
Graduate Student Research Grants
Fall 2023
- Drew Heiderscheidt (Geography), "Centennial Struggles: Historical Geographies of Direct Action, Mutual Aid, & Criminalization in Colorado's Front Range, 1900-1940s"
- Leandro Martan (Spanish and Portuguese), "Race, Identity, and Afro-Brazilian Representation in the São Paulo Art Museum's Collection"
- Shelly Mclean Bent (Education Leadership and Policy Studies), "Mapping the Governance Structure for Multicultural Education Policy Implementation for Indigenous and Ethnic Communities: The Case of the Afro-Colombian Studies Program and the Raizal Community."
- Beatriz Ribeiro (Anthropology), "How Politics Travel: The Challenges of Indigenous Participation in Global Environmental Governance"
Spring 2024
- Paloma Czapla (History), "Refusing the Lens of the State: Archives, Photography and Black Women’s Lives in Post-Abolition São Paulo, Brazil"
- Lisa Doi (American Studies), "Journey to the Ireito: Japanese American Community Pilgrimages, Place, Identity, and Repair"
- Rachel Garza (Spanish and Portuguese), "'We speak la raza (the people): How Spanish sound reduction communicate ethnolinguistics and community identity in the borderlands of Texas"
- Chandler Hawkins (Educational Leadership & Policy Studies), "We Have Always Been Beautiful: A Critical Narrative Analysis Examining Black Undergraduate Women's Experiences with (Un) Desirability"
- Shahzarin Khan (Applied Health Science), "An Intersectional Qualitative Study of South Asian Women's Sexual Pleasure"
- Peper Langhout (American Studies), "Passive Cooperation, Artificial Motivation": Preliminary Research on Discourses of Recidivism and Cure at the Lexington Narcotics Hospital (1935-1973)"
- Maggie Lawler (Sociology), "Dissertation Pilot Study: 2-Week Ethnography of an International School in China"
- Andrea Marañón Laguna (Anthropology), "Maya Aesthetics: Crafting Heritage via the Tourism Industry"
- Uzoamaka Nwachukwu (History), "Negotiating Citizenship: Taxation and Resistance in Colonial Eastern Nigeria, 1930-1960"
- Laís Lara Vanin (Spanish & Portuguese), "Curly She-Wolves: Black Women and the Conquest of Freedom in Afro-Brazilian Literature"
Graduate Student Travel Grants
- Sabina Ali (Religious Studies), "How Food Labels Can Uphold Settler Colonialism"
- Sydney-Paige Patterson (History), "Loving & Writing Towards Liberation: Black and Dalit Women's Radical Vision in the Black and Dalit Panther Parties"
Faculty Research Grants
- Ana Carneiro (Playwriting), "Public Mother"
- Koji Chavez (Sociology), "Who Contributes to Diversity? A Conjoint Experiment of Diversity Value"
- Vanessa Miller (Educational Leadership and Policy Studies), "Analyzing the Use of Race and Ethnicity in Timely Warnings and Emergency Notifications by Campus Police"
- Kosali Simon (School of Public and Environmental Affairs), "Antidepressant Use Among Black Americans in the Wake of Police Brutality Events During the COVID Era"
AFFILIATE NEWS & ACCOMPLISHMENTS
- Maria Hamilton Abegunde (African American and African Diaspora Studies, Faculty Affiliate) received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to host a residential program on the topic of “Content Warning: Engaging Trauma and Controversy in Research Collections.” She received the Trustees Teaching Award and Collaborative Research Award for the project “Sister Song: The Requiem.” She is also a co-director for the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), Indiana University. Along with Dr. Raymond Wise, she researched and explored the life (real and re/imagined) of Elizabeth “Lizzie” Breckenridge (1843-1910) through original poetry, prose, music, and performances. This research is in exhibit at the Wylie House Museum at IU. She also published “The Spirit of the Rhythm Catches You and You Dance” in Black Joy Unbound, edited by Stephanie Andrea Allen and Lauren Cherelle; “I Want to Go Home. Now!” in Trigger Warnings, edited by Joan Hawkins; and “I Chose to Stay Awake” in SO WE CAN KNOW: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth, edited by Aracelis Girmay.
- Ani Abrahamyan (Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Graduate Affiliate) was recently appointed as an Assistant Professor of Russian Studies at Hamilton College (Clinton, NY). She is a recipient of the Indiana University College of Arts and Sciences Travel Award & Indiana University REEI/Mellon Endowment Graduate Student Travel Grant Organizer of Sergei Parajanov’s Centennial Celebration at Indiana University Cinema.
- Stephanie Andrea Allen (Gender Studies, Faculty Affiliate) published “I Am a Lesbian: Black Queer Subjectivities in The Watermelon Woman and Pariah” in Women, Gender, and Families of Color and co-edited a collection of creative writing titled Black Joy Unbound: An Anthology. Her book manuscript, “We Must Document Ourselves Now”: Black Lesbian Cultural Legacies and the Politics of Self-Representation, is under contract with The Ohio State University Press. She presented “What About Your Friends?: Queerious, Living Single, and the Utopic Possibilities of Black Friendship” at Console-ing Passions: International Conference on Television, Audio, Video, New Media, and Feminism in Canada; and was invited to share her perspectives on “Black Language, Literacy, and Black Literature” at Michigan State University. Stephanie was also invited to present “On Mammification: How Latinas Saved the Barbies from Themselves” (Indiana Arts and Humanities Council) and “On Black Feminist Praxis: Intersecting Identities and the Politics of Location” (AAADS). This spring, Stephanie participated in the Mellon Foundation-funded program “Black Queerness and the Everyday” at UNC-Chapel Hill. She was a panelist on the “Storytelling Through Speculative Fiction and VR” program hosted by the Center of Excellence for Women in Technology and the Women & Tech Sci-Fi Club at Indiana University Bloomington. She serves as conference chair for the Black Women’s Studies Association and organized their inaugural Black Women’s Studies Symposium in October 2023 entitled “Looking Forward: Black Women’s Studies in the 21st Century.” Just last month, Stephanie was elected Faculty Co-Chair of the newly instituted LGBTQ+ Staff and Faculty Council at Indiana University Bloomington.
- Liza Black (History and Native American and Indigenous Studies, Faculty Affiliate) will be a Racial Justice Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School during the 2024-25 school year. She will also be publishing a forum on Native America and the carceral state in the American Historical Review in 2024. Her book on missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and two spirits will be out in 2025 with John Hopkins University Press.
- Dasha Carver (Counseling and Educational Psychology, Graduate Affiliate) received the Student Research Grant from the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality (SSSS) in the amount of $1,500 for her dissertation titled, “The Impact of Sexual and Cultural Betrayal Trauma on Black American's Sexual Pleasure.” The award also comes with a reduction in costs to attend the 2024 Conference in San Diego. During the Summer of 2023, she received the Paul F. Munger Memorial Award given on behalf of the Department of Counseling and Educational Psychology. This award is given to students who demonstrate outstanding scholarship in clinical practice, counseling techniques, contribution to research in application of clinical practice, outstanding performance in clinical practice, and outstanding character, leadership and service.
- Amrita Chakrabarti Myers (History, Faculty Affiliate) published her second book, "The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn" (UNC/Ferris and Ferris, 2023) in October. A dozen years in the making, this new monograph was made possible through the financial support of a number of organizations and entities, including CRRES. Additionally, according to a letter from President Pamela Whitten, her promotion to full professor will be confirmed by the Board of Trustees in June 2024.
- Koji Chavez (Sociology, Faculty Affiliate) has a forthcoming article, "Hiring Discrimination Under Pressures to Diversify: Gender, Race, and Diversity Commodification Across Job Transitions in Software Engineering" in the American Sociological Review (with Katherine Weisshaar and Tania Cabello-Hutt). This research received support from the CRRES Faculty Seed Grant.
- Deborah Cohn (Spanish and Portuguese, Faculty Affiliate), shares her most meaningful accomplishment was having the opportunity to advocate for language education. She published, "Fewer U.S. college students are studying a foreign language − and that spells trouble for national security" in The Conversation and shares she has been fortunate to be able to weigh in on the issues in other recent articles like, "The End of Foreign Language Instruction," in The Atlantic.
- Vanessa Cruz Nichols (Political Science, Faculty Affiliate) received the Early Career Award through the Midwest Political Science Association’s (MPSA) Latina/o Caucus and was honored as a Distinguished Alumni at her undergraduate alma mater, DePaul University. Vanessa Cruz Nichols was on a prestigious research award leave through the Ford Foundation (2023-2024) and had a visiting scholar appointment through Purdue University’s Political Science Department. Throughout this time, she worked on completing her book manuscript ("Peril and Promise: Catalysts of Political Action Among Latinxs") and will be workshopping the book draft with external guest discussants. The book workshop conference on May 10th was made possible through the support through unwavering support of IU's Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society (CRRES) and the IU Office of the Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Thanks to the Ford Fellowship, between June 2023-January 2024, she collected 39 semi-structured interviews with 21 different national and local immigration organizations across the U.S.
- Irit Dekel (Germanic Studies and Jewish Studies, Faculty Affiliate) will be a Residential Fellow (Spring 2025) with the Institute for Advanced Study at Indiana University Bloomington.
- Lisa Doi (American Studies, Graduate Affiliate) is a recipient for the 2024-2025 President's Diversity Dissertation Fellowship.
- Olivia Ekeh (African American and African Diaspora Studies, Postdoctoral Scholar) was awarded a Princeton University Press book proposal development grant and published in the reader, Introduction to Afrofuturism: A Mixtape in Black Literature & Arts titled, "I’m a Witness: Surviving Dystopia Through the Sonic Memory of Black Women in When I Get Home."
- Brad R. Fulton (O'Neill SPEA) published "Activity and Identity: Uncovering Multiple Institutional Logics in the Nonprofit Sector” in Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Quarterly (with Robert Ressler and Pamela Paxton), and “Strategic Alliances: The Political Efficacy of Religious-Secular Ties" in Mobilization (with Richard Wood and Rebecca Sager). Fulton received several grants including a $30,000 grant from the IU Social Sciences Research Funding Program for "Philanthropy Deserts: Examining How Structural Racism Shapes Charitable Giving," $437,495 from AmeriCorps for "Observing Civic Engagement & Assessing Civic Infrastructure" (with Matthew Baggetta). Fulton was also awarded the 2024 Outstanding Academic Leader in Data from Chief Data Officer Magazine and the 2023 Data & Analytics Section Award (for the Google Maps Sampling Frame project) from ARNOVA.
- Melissa Garcia (Sociology, Graduate Affiliate) received the Grant-in-Aid Doctoral Dissertation Research Award and will be joining the Department of Sociology at Texas State University as an Assistant Professor in the fall. She is excited to return to her home state.
- Faye R. Gleisser (Art History, Faculty Affiliate) published her first book, "Risk Work: Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967-1987" with the University of Chicago Press. The transcript of an important conversation she participated in with Dr. Huey Copeland and Dr. Sampada Aranke, focusing on the histories of white supremacy and racial formation in the history of art, titled, "Art History After Black Studies" appeared in the print October 2023 issue of the international contemporary art journal, Artforum. Gleisser was also the recipient of a 2023 CAHI/Kinsey Research Fellowship, in support of my second book project, "The Color of Hormones."
- Dorainne Green (Psychological and Brain Sciences, Faculty Affiliate) received the NIH Leadership and Education Advancement Program Fellow and Trustees’ Teaching Award (2024). She published “Cuing disparities: The consequences of race-based social stressors for academic achievement” (along with co-authors Kathyryn Mary Kroeper and Mary C. Murphy) in the Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology; “Solidarity-Based collective action among third parties: The role of emotion regulation and moral outrage” (with co-authors Ajua Duker, Ivuoma N. Onyeador, and Jennifer A. Richeson) in Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy.
- Monica Heilman (Sociology, Graduate Affiliate) received Third Place in the North Central Sociological Association 2024 Seidler Graduate Paper Competition Award.
- Karen Inouye (History and American Studies) will publish, Mary Kitagawa, A Nikkei Canadian Life with Stanford University Press this fall.
- Jonathan Kang (Counseling Psychology, Graduate Affiliate) presented “Hegemonic Narcissism: Social Identity Comparisons Within Systems of Oppression” in a poster session at the 2024 American Psychological Association Convention. He published (along with Joel Wong), “The model minority myth” in Untangling the threat of racism: A primer for pediatric health professionals. At IU, he facilitated the Asian Culture Center workshop, “Identity and Our Lived Experiences,” for AAPI students on racial and ethnic identity development at the Retracing Our Roots retreat and co-facilitated the School of Education Community Conversations event, “Debunking the Model Minority Myth.” He also developed and served in the position of the Asian Culture Center's On-site Mental Health Counselor (2023-2024).
- Mallika Khanna (Media School, Graduate Affiliate) received a College Arts and Humanities Institute (CAHI) Travel grant for SCMS, completed the Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities Fellowship (IDAH) and presented work at the 2024 IDAH Symposium.
- Aziza Khazzoom (Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, Faculty Affiliate) mentored an URP student, convened a focus group and conducted individual interviews on the Gaza war, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and silencing.
- Mihee Kim-Kort (Religious Studies, Graduate Affiliate) participated in the 2023American Examples Cohort at University of Alabama and in a cohort for “Religion and Racial Justice: Expanding the Moral Imaginary Through Film" (Funded by the Luce Foundation, Union Theological Seminary, and Episcopal Divinity School). Mihee received grants for two projects on religion, race, and film including the Lilly Endowment Grant for a collaborative project called "Enfleshing Witness: Rewilding Otherwise Preaching." She published "Daddy I Do: purity balls, evangelical ideals of virginity, family values, and whiteness" in the Journal of Theology and Sexuality.
- David Konisky (O'Neill SPEA) is a co-PI on a grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “Evaluating the Environmental, Behavioral, and Financial Benefits of Electrification and Energy Efficiency for Underserved Communities,” which was awarded on July 1, 2023 for a total of $1,124,673.
- Hyeyoung Kwon (Sociology, Faculty Affiliate) shares Stanford University Press is set to release her forthcoming book, "Language Brokers: Children of Immigrants Translating Inequality and Belonging for their Families," on August 6, 2024.
- Alex Lichtenstein (History and American Studies) co-curated (with Phoebe Wolfskill and Rasul Mowatt) the exhibit, "Unmasked: The Anti-Lynching Exhibit of 1935 and Community Remembrance in Indiana," which has been displayed at the Crisus Attucks Museum (Indianapolis), the Civil Rights Heritage Center (South Bend), and the Town Clock Church Tower (New Albany).
- Noriko Manabe (Music Theory, Faculty Affiliate) won the Public-Facing Scholarship Award at the Society for Music Theory, “Abe Road: Kuwata Keisuke’s Beatles Parody,” SMT-V 8.1 (2022), and was featured in a BBC Radio 3 Sunday Feature, “Sakamoto - Art Is Long, Life Is Short,” which aired April 21st. She also received an international course development grant from Hutton Honors College and delivered keynotes at Music Theory Society Midwest and Queen’s University (Belfast, in the Conference on Politics in Music and Song).
- Sylvia Martinez (School of Education and Latino Studies Program, Faculty Affiliate) published "'I am not Latino enough": Latinx ethnic identity and participation at La Casa" in the Journal of College Student Development (with Amy Nuñez), and "I always get deleted from the analysis": Multiracial Latinx students navigating racial/ethnic identity in the book The Latinx Experience: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (with Amy Nuñez).
- Jason McGraw (History, Faculty Affiliate) was a Visiting Fellow in 2023 at the British Library's Eccles Centre for American Studies, where he conducted research on his ongoing project, "The Sound that Moves You: A Social History of Jamaican Music and Migration."
- Vanessa Miller (School of Education, Faculty Affiliate) was awarded an internal grant to analyze the Indianapolis Public Schools district policies regarding school police, technologies, and surveillance. Additionally, she will be involved in this summer's Martha McCarthy Education Law and Policy Institute on June 18th.
- Juan Ignacio Mora (History and Latino Studies Program, Faculty Affiliate) published the essay "How Unions Are Made" in The Nation, received the Andrés Torres Paper Series Award from University of Massachusetts, Boston's Mauricio Gastón Institute for Latino Community Development and Public Policy and was a Kovener Teaching Fellow this year.
- Walton Muyumba (English, Faculty Affiliate) was named a Ruth N. Halls Associate Professor. He has published two peer-reviewed essays, one peer-reviewed book chapter, a work of creative nonfiction, and five book reviews. His recent publications include “Archives of Improvisation: Abstraction and Global Blackness in the Artworks of Caroline Kent," in Q Notes: Questions in Theory and Arts Practices, “The Rumba Archive” in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and “Seeds” in the Virginia Quarterly Review. He presented two symposium talks and presented at three conferences including the “Colonialism’s Resonant Ongoingness in Global Black Cinema,” “Cinema and Slavery: A Workshop,” and “Music Video as Black Art: Claiming the B-Side: A Symposium celebrating the 10-year anniversary of the liquid blackness as a study group” at Georgia State University.
- John Nieto-Phillips (History and Latino Studies, Faculty Affiliate) received generous support from the College Arts and Humanities Institute (CAHI), the Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies (CLACS), the Office of Vice President for International Affairs (OVPIA), and the Wickes Fund for the Study of War and Society (via the History Department) to advance his book research on fascism, espionage, and diplomacy in US-Spanish relations during the Spanish Civil War and World War II. He presented aspects of his research at conferences in Boulder (Colorado) and in Soria (Spain). He also shared preliminary findings in Madrid, at La Universidad Complutense (UCM), La Casa de Velazquez, the International Institute of Education (IIE), and the Benjamin Franklin Institute for North American Studies at La Universidad de Alcalá de Henares. This coming year, he will be offering a newly developed graduate colloquium (History H699) on "Fascism and Anti-Fascism" in U.S., Latin American, and European contexts since the 1910s.
- Stephanie T.X. Nguyen (Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, Graduate Affiliate) received the IU President's Diversity Dissertation Fellowship for 2024-2025.
- Dina Okamoto (Sociology, Faculty Affiliate) published (along with coauthors Muna Adem, Shelley Rao, Helen B. Marrow, Melissa Garcia) “A Relational Approach to Perceived Discrimination: The Case of South Asian Indians” in a Special Issue: Race, Racism and Discrimination in Social Psychology Quarterly.
- Solimar Otero (Latino Studies, Gender Studies, and Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Faculty Affiliate) had two publications recently come out. One on “Gender in Caribbean Religions” in The Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Religions (Edited by Michelle González Maldonado) and “Subversive spirits and ostentatious materials: An African diasporic necropolitics of agitation” in American Religion (with Kristina Wirtz).
- Alberto Ortega (O'Neill SPEA, Faculty Affiliate) received a grant from the Spencer Foundation small grant, was appointed as Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research Research and Institute for Economic Equity, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. He published an article "DOJ Intervention and the Checkpoint Shift: Profiling Hispanic Motorists Under the §287(g) Program" in AEA Papers & Proceedings.
- Oscar Patrón (Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, Faculty Affiliate) published "(Re)orienting white spaces through compañerismo: Latino graduate students creating homeplaces at a PWI" in the Journal of College Student Development. He received the Emerging Scholar Award from the IU Latino Faculty and Staff Council (LFSC) and the Trustees Teaching Award.
- Tania Ravaei (Sociology, Graduate Affiliate) was selected to be a Social Networks and Health Fellow, was funded to visit Duke University for workshop to learn R, and received a Mellon Mays Graduate Enhancement Grant ($2,000).
- Peper Rivers (Langhout) (American Studies, Graduate Affiliate) debuted her pre-dissertation archival research at the CRRES Research Symposium, entitled, "Passive Cooperation, Artificial Motivation: Preliminary Research on Discourses of Recidivism and Cure at the Lexington Narcotics Hospital (1935-1973)." She was granted a CRRES graduate research grant to pursue original archival research on Lexington Hospital at NARA-Atlanta. Her study will focus on how carceral institutions have come to be described as "care providers," specifically in addiction medicine and mental health care. Peper also renewed her relationship with the Indiana Women's Prison (IWP) History Project this year, alongside IU-I Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Medical Humanities Dr. Elizabeth Nelson, in offering HIS-380: "The History of Mental Institutions" to women currently incarcerated in Indianapolis. Peper has been a volunteer with IWP education programs since 2017. Peper presented her work on Black satirical novelist Paul Beatty at the IU English Department's Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference. For this paper, she was awarded the 2023 Gunderson Award for Best Paper in American Studies.
- Olga Rodríguez-Ulloa, (American Studies and Latino Studies, Faculty Affiliate), published “Chola Sex Party: Anal and Concha Art” in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, as part of a Special Issue on “Obscenity, Censorship, and Libidinal Politics in Latin America." She also published “‘How Does a Women Poet Fuck?’ A Glos/sary on the Possibilities of Chola Transfeminisms” in Bodies in the Line. Gender, Sexuality, and Performance in Latin America and the Caribbean (Michigan University Press). Prof. Rodríguez-Ulloa was invited to the Lozano Long Conference at University of Texas Austin "Indigenous Lands, Resisting Sexualities in Abiayala," which highlighted the work of Indigenous scholars, activists, and Performers in the Americas. At IU, Professor Rodriguez Ulloa was awarded a Public Arts and Humanities Project Grant of the Arts and Humanities Institute with the proposal “Afro-Sonic Experiments and Feminists Aesthetics” featuring the experimental collaboration of Peruvian, Berlin-based musicians Ale Hop and Laura Robles. Prof. Rodríguez-Ulloa participates in the Indigenous Futures initiative and in the Academic Committee for the “Inaugural Conference on Global Indigenous Studies from Multiple Perspectives” at IU next November.
- Fabio Rojas (Sociology, Faculty Affiliate), notes his most notable publication this year is this edited volume: Rojas, Fabio and Charlotta Stern. 2024. Sociology and Classical Liberalism in Dialogue: Freedom is Something We Do Together. Lexington Books/Rowman & Littlefield.
- Yael R. Rosenstock Gonzalez (School of Public Health - Applied Health Sciences, Graduate Affiliate) accepted to write (and submitted) a book chapter: "Liberation-Centered Learning Spaces: Implementing Joy, Relationships, and Power-Shifting" for the book, Fundamental Concepts and Critical Developments in Sex Education: Intersectional and Trauma Informed Approaches (Inaugural Edition), to be published by Routledge and edited by Reece Malone, Tracie Q. Gilbert, Catherine Dukes, and Justine Ang Fonte.
- Eric Sader (Business Law & Ethics, Faculty Affiliate) was inducted into the Faculty Academy on Excellence in Teaching (FACET), selected as a teaching team finalist for the 2024 FACET Innovate Award for DEIJ-Informed Pedagogy, and selected as a 2024 Learning Analytics Fellow.
- Marvin Sterling (Anthropology, Faculty Affiliate) received the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fellowship for Advanced Social Science Research on Japan for research on “Narrating the Afro-Japanese 'Hafu' Experience: Race, Nation and Multipolar Globalization in Contemporary Japan.” ($60,000)
- Vivek Vellanki (School of Education, Faculty Affiliate) published "Image technologies and visual methodologies: Reflections, experimentations, and future redirections" in Qualitative Inquiry. Vivek started a new research project on "Children are citizens and creators: Reimagining citizenship and curriculum using children’s art." The project is funded by Creative Pathways to Peace Grant, School of Education & Institute for Advanced Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington. As part of the project, he conducted workshops with teachers in India through the IU India Gateway as well as undergraduate students at IU. He hopes to release a public facing publication from this work. He also participated in the IAS Symposia: Book in Hand where he shared his ongoing collaborative work with Divya Victor and Aaron Cohick examining violence against South Asians in the U.S.
- Tiffanie Vo (Sociology, Graduate Affiliate) published "Asian Americans and Income Inequality: Disparities between and within Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Groups" in Sociological Perspectives (with Cyrus Schleifer and Peyman Hekmatpour), and was awarded a grant from the Asian American Studies Program. She also presented at various conferences including the American Sociological Association (ASA) 2023 Annual meeting and the 2024 Asian American Studies Symposium at IU.
- Jakobi Williams (African American and African Diaspora Studies, Faculty Affiliate) was promoted to full professor. He also appeared in over a dozen radio, television, newspaper, and podcast interviews, including NPR, local TV Fox 59, and CBS 4 affiliates. He served as a researcher and appeared as an interviewee for the History Channel 8-part documentary "Kennedy" to commemorate the 50th anniversary of JFK's assassination. Provided over 20 invited lectures such as the the Indiana Civil Rights Commission (Governor's Office), Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library, and the University of California Administrators' Council Annual Convening. Jakobi Williams also presented a keynote address at six conferences, including the American Historical Association, the Association of Black Cultural Centers Conference, and the National Council for Black Studies. He chaired the completion of four doctoral degrees (1 at Purdue) and 2 MA degrees and took 18 IU students on a study abroad trip to Ghana. Lastly, he served as a consultant for 7 national organizations, including the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the College Board-AP African American Studies.
- Phoebe Wolfskill (American Studies and African American and African Diaspora Studies, Faculty Affiliate) co-curated “Unmasked: The Anti-Lynching Exhibitions of 1935 and Methods of Public Community Remembrance” with Drs. Alex Lichtenstein and Rasul Mowattwhich. The exhibit opened at the Cook Center IU Bloomington and then moved to the Crispus Attucks Museum in Indianapolis. It is now traveling the state as a smaller mobile exhibition. The exhibition received funding from several grants and awards, including a Lilly Foundation Award, an Allen Whitehill Clowes Charitable Foundation, Inc. Grant, a Platform Arts and Humanities Laboratory Award, an Institute for Advanced Study Collaborative Research Award, and an Indiana University’s Arts and Humanities Council Grant. Phoebe Wolfskill presented her reflections on this exhibition on a panel at the College Art Association Conference. She was also awarded the Trustees Teaching Award, the College of Arts and Sciences Career Connections Fellowship Program, and a Research Travel Grant through the College Arts & Humanities Institute (CAHI). Her peer-reviewed article “'Comedy, Pathos, Delight, and Horror’: Satire in the Work of Joyce J. Scott” will appear in Woman’s Art Journal.
- Joel Wong (Counseling and Educational Psychology, Faculty Affiliate) received, for the second year in a row, the Asian American Journal of Psychology's Best Paper Award for the article, "'Please forgive me': Asian and Pacific Islander Americans’ suicide notes," (along with co-authors Kuo Deng and Yi Li) in Asian American Journal of Psychology.
- Travis Wright (History, Graduate Affiliate) was awarded the 2023–2024 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship and recently accepted a tenure track position as an Assistant Professor of African American History at the University of Washington in Seattle. He will begin in the fall.
- Cynthia Wu (Gender Studies and Asian American Studies, Faculty Affiliate) “Accessible Academic Publishing.” In Crip Authorship. Eds. Rebecca Sanchez and Mara Mills. New York: New York University Press, 2023. 237-243.
- Ellen Wu (History, Faculty Affiliate) received an Honorary Membership to the Gamma of Indiana Chapter, Phi Beta Kappa, the IU BFC Inclusive Excellence Award, and attended the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association annual conference in Indianapolis as an invited panelist on the topic of “Situating Ourselves in the Civil Rights Movement: What They Didn’t Teach You in Law School.
Postdoctoral Scholar Program
The aim of the CRRES Postdoctoral Scholar Program is to nurture the careers of the next generation of scholars conducting research on race and ethnicity. Each year, CRRES conducts a nationwide search and selects postdoctoral scholars in the social sciences and humanities to be housed in departments and schools across campus.
I appreciate all that CRRES does but especially their postdoctoral fellow program. This program brings so much new intellectual energy to this campus, and it has been absolutely instrumental to more established faculty as they connect with this new generation of scholars. - Cynthia Wu, Faculty Affiliate, Gender Studies
Upcoming Placements
- Olivia Ekeh, Indiana University, Assistant Professor, Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, 2024-25
Congratulations Olivia!
I owe a huge part of my professional success this year to the CRRES writing group specifically and the overall community of CRRES in general. Having the opportunity to receive feedback on works in progress has helped me fall back in love with doing the historical work I always imagined myself doing. - Olivia Ekeh
Incoming CRRES Postdoctoral Fellows
In Fall 2024, CRRES will welcome three Postdoctoral Fellows, Korinthia Nicolai, Lucía Stavig, and Ramón Resendiz, to our community! Read more about each incoming postdoctoral scholar and their research below.
Korinthia Nicolai
Korinthia D. Nicolai is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Counseling and Educational Psychology. She received her Ph.D. from Virginia Commonwealth University and is a proud graduate of community college. Her line of research focuses on how race and racism shape academic contexts and how those contexts shape Black and Brown students' motivation and belonging. Additionally, she explores how psychology research and the educational psychology field can better examine racism and take anti-colonial and/or critical approaches. At CRRES she will work on publishing her dissertation focused on Black and Latine STEM students’ experiences related to belonging and further continuing her line of research. She will also work on fostering and establishing collaborations with students to “talk back” to narratives about them (Annamma et al., 2013).
Lucia Stavig
Dr. Lucía Isabel Stavig is a CRRES Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University. Prior to this appointment, she was a Penn-Mellon Just Futures Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD in Cultural and Medical Anthropology from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2022), a Master’s in Anthropology from the University of Lethbridge, Canada (2017), a Master’s in Justice and Social Inquiry from Arizona State University (2013), and a Bachelor of Arts from New College of Florida (2010). She is Peruvian-American and has had the honor to learn with Las Abejas and the zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico; the Rama people in Nicaragua; the Ñhäñhú (Otomí) in Hidalgo, Mexico; the Kainai (Blackfoot) in southern Alberta, and the Runa (Quechua) of the Cusco area. Lucía´s research explores how Indigenous peoples’ struggles for health are also political defenses of their lands and more-than-human relations. Her work in reproductive and Indigenous justice follows the efforts of First peoples from Canada to southern Peru to heal from colonial reproductive violences (including forced sterilization, forced contraception, obstetric violence, and genocide) to create Indigenous futures for generations to come.
Ramon Resendiz
Ramón Resendiz is a Chicanx documentary filmaker and media anthropologist from the south Texas U.S.-Mexico borderlands. He is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Media School at Indiana University. He holds a Ph.D. in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University and a Master of Communication from the Native Voices Program at University of Washington. His research interrogates the material and imaginary intersections of national borders, memory, visual culture, systemic violence, and settler colonialism. His book project, Archival Resistance: Countervisual Documentary Media on the Margins of the U.S., investigates the historic violence, erasures, and undocumentation of critical Latinx Indigeneities in the national constructions of Texas, Mexico, and the U.S. He critically studies how settler colonial nation states are visualized by archival institutions across the south Texas/U.S. and northern Mexico border landscapes, and the ways visual documentary producers contest and render these erasures visible.
His filmography includes an array of collaborative community-based documentaries regarding immigration, social justice, human rights issues, Indigenous resistance, and the evidentiary. Chief of these is El Muro | The Wall (2017), a feature-length documentary film project co-produced with the Lipan Apache Band of Texas Tribal Board. The film documented the historic resistance exercised by Lipan Apache/Ndé peoples against colonial occupation and persecution in the south Texas borderlands. It follows Dr. Eloisa G. Tamez’s legal battle against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (USDHS) use of eminent domain to build the U.S. Border Wall of 2006 on her ancestral lands. His films have been screened across film festivals, community screenings, and both academic conferences, and in non-academic spaces.
2023-2024 CRRES STAFF
- Sylvia Martinez, Director
- Sonia Lee, Associate Director
- Jessica Smith, Administrative Assistant
- Melissa Garcia, Graduate Assistant
- Dasha Carver, Graduate Assistant & Undergraduate Research Program Liaison
- Anna Sarprong, Social Media and Communications Intern
We could not do this work without the generous support of the Office of the Provost, the College of Arts and Sciences, the School of Education, Office of the Vice Provost for Research, and the Office of the Vice President for Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion.