Ishan Ashutosh
(Geography) — 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. He is an affiliate of IU's Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Carlos Avenancio-Leon
(Business) — Avenancio-Leon is an economist whose work focuses on how financial and economic conditions affect group inequality and discrimination. He is an affiliate of IU's Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Clark Barwick
(Business) — 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. He is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Jeannine Bell
(Law) — A nationally recognized scholar in the area of policing and hate crime, Bell has written extensively on criminal justice issues. Bell’s research is broadly interdisciplinary, touching on both political science and law. She is an affiliate of IU's Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Liza Black
(History) Liza Black is a citizen of Cherokee Nation and teaches and writes on American Indian history. Her first book, "Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960," argues that mid-century films served as a space where Native people inhabited representations of themselves while also using film work for economic survivance. Her second book, "How to Get Away With Murder," is a transnational history of the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. One of the book's chapters addresses the life of Savanna Greywind and will appear in the edited volume, Gender and the American West, with Routledge in 2021. She is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
James Brooks
(Education) — Brooks' research are at the intersection of intergroup dynamics and relationship science. He examines how race influences aspects of relationships development such as attraction, sexuality, commitment, and personal narratives. Brooks' primary focus is with interracial romantic relationships and multiracial families.
Elizabeth Browning
(History) -- Browning’s research examines the history of environmental health and environmental justice in the Midwest. Her scholarship and public history work also explore the cultural and intellectual history of public attitudes towards environmental change and climate justice issues in the US.
Cara Caddoo
(History) – Caddoo is an historian of film, mass media, race, and African American history and an affiliate of IU's Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society. Her first book uncovered the pioneering role of African Americans in the history of American cinema. She is currently writing a biography about the actor and filmmaker Noble Johnson.
Jessica Calarco
(Sociology) — Part of Calarco’s research discusses how inequalities impact families, students and schools.
Carolyn Calloway-Thomas
(African American and African Diaspora Studies) — Calloway-Thomas’s research focuses on the rhetorical/intellectual history of Black Americans, intersections between empathy and race, intercultural/interracial communication, pedagogy of empathy, and civic engagement. She studies how words work in framing people’s perceptions of race and ethnicity, as well as how discourses of change impact Black Americans.
Amrita Chakrabarti Myers
(History and Gender Studies) — Myers is a Black women’s historian. Her research focuses on race, gender, freedom, and power, and the ways in which these constructs intersect with one another in the lives of Black women in the Old South. She is the author of "Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston,” and is finishing a new book, “The Vice President’s Black Wife: Resurrecting Julia Chinn.” She is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Koji Chavez
(Sociology) — His current research focuses on inequality-producing social processes within organizations, specifically, on how gender, race, ethnicity, and “foreignness” influence job candidate evaluations and legitimation of hiring decisions. Chavez is an affiliate of IU's Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Deborah Cohn
(Spanish and Portuguese) — Cohn’s research interests include Cold War studies, transnationalism, international education, comparative literatures of the Americas, and the Global South. She also teaches Latinx and Spanish American literature, and the intersections of both with questions of race and ethnicity. She is an affiliate of IU's Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Vanessa Cruz Nichols
(Political Science) — Cruz Nichols specializes in American Politics. Her research interests fall within the scope of political participation, public opinion, racialized threat, immigration politics, policing, emotions, political psychology, and race and ethnicity politics. She is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Irit Dekel
(Germanic Studies and Jewish Studies) — Dekel is an assistant professor in Germanic Studies and Jewish Studies. Her work focuses on the relations between collective memory, media and the public sphere, particularly on Holocaust memorialization and the representation of ethnic and religious difference in contemporary Germany, using ethnography as well as discourse analysis. Dekel’s research has additionally raised questions on the intersection of nationalism and pluralism. She has studied the circumcision debate in Germany and Israelis in Berlin. Dekel is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Christopher DeSante
(Political Science) — DeSante’s research focuses on race and racism in America, American political partisanship and political methodology. He is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Brad Fulton
(Public and Environmental Affairs) — Fulton is an associate professor in the O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs and an expert on the social, political, and economic impact of community-based organizations. His research analyzes the causes and consequences of racial, socioeconomic, and religious diversity within organizations. Fulton seeks to explain how some organizations become diverse and how diversity influences their outcomes. He is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Ross Gay
(English) — Gay is a nationally known poet and public speaker who has published three books of poetry including "Against Which"; "Bringing the Shovel Down"; "Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude"; and "Be Holding". He is also author of the essay collection "A Book of Delights." Gay is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Faye Gleisser
(Art History) — 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. Gleisser’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. She is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Dorraine Green
(Psychological and Brain Sciences) — Green is an assistant professor in psychological and brain sciences. Green’s research interests center broadly on understanding and addressing the factors that contribute to social inequality by focusing on social identity threat – i.e., instances where individuals feel like one or more of their social identities may be devalued or disrespected. Specifically, her work investigates how threats to social identity including group-based discrimination and stereotype threat shape cognitive, psychological, behavioral, and physiological outcomes that, in turn, have implications for disparities in many life domains. She is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Shane Greene
(Anthropology) — Greene studies punk subcultures, music, art, popular culture, race, resistance, anarchism, social movements and most anything else that inspires at the intersection of creative multimedia ethnography and critical social theory. He is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Valerie Grim
(African American and African Diaspora) — 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-present. She is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Vivian Halloran
(English)—Halloran's research and teaching interests are profoundly interdisciplinary. She is a Caribbeanist by training and a literary food studies scholar by vocation. Her work considers how postmodern Caribbean historical novels about slavery function as museums by curating artwork and other objects within their pages. Her current project examines those moments when Americans of Caribbean descent address themselves to the American people to share the lessons of their immigrant upbringing. She is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Elaine Hernandez
(Sociology) — A nationally recognized scholar, Hernandez’s research addresses the structural forces that contribute to the formation and reproduction of social inequalities in health in order to prevent or alleviate them.
Sarah Imhoff
(Religious Studies) — Imhoff's research interests include gender and American Jewish History, race and Jewishness, and American religion. One of her current research projects deals with the relationship of race and DNA in defining Jewishness. She is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Karen Inouye
(History & American Studies) — Inouye's research interests focus on Asian American and Asian Canadian Studies, transnational American Studies, 20th-century U.S. History, and critical race studies. She is the author of "The Long Afterlife of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration”, which 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. She is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Pamela Jackson
(Sociology) — Jackson’s research and teaching interests include social psychology, mental illness, race and ethnicity, and life course processes. Her more recent publications draw attention to the importance of siblings in affirming a strong family identify in African American, Mexican American and White families; racial health disparities, especially those faced by the Black middle class; and the similarities and differences in the relationship between social role occupancy (being a parent, worker, spouse) and mental health among diverse populations. Jackson is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Alisha Jones
Alisha Lola Jones (Folklore and Ethnomusicology) — Jones is an ethnomusicologist whose research interests include musical masculinities, global pop music, music and theology, the music industry, Western European art music, world vocal pedagogies, critical race studies, and musics of the African diaspora. She is the author of "Flaming: The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance." Jones' research examines Black men's performance of gender and sexuality in gospel music and African American worship settings. She is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Aziza Khazzoom
(Global and International Studies) — Khazzoom studies racial/ethnic boundary making in Israel/Palestine, asking how it is informed by Jews’ unique relationship to European colonialism and the east/west dichotomy. Her research highlights connections between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia that affect racial hierarchies in many societies, including the US. Her current project examines these US dynamics. She is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
David Konisky
(Public and Environmental Affairs) — Konisky’s research focuses on U.S. environmental policy, with particular emphasis on regulation, federalism and state politics, public opinion, and environmental justice. He is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Hyeyoung Kwon
(Sociology) — Kwon’s research and teaching interests include race, immigration, childhood, and family, with an eye towards understanding how children of immigrants respond to social exclusion. Her current project examines the lives of Mexican- and Korean Americans language brokers in a sociohistorical moment where immigrants of color are depicted as threats to the economic stability of true Americans. She is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Eric Kyere
(Social Health and Well Being) — Kyere's research takes an evolutionary perspective to understand and define racism, and identify the underlying mechanism by which racism revives itself to reproduce and maintain unequal life outcomes that disproportionately affect people of African descent, and ways to disrupt it.
Jennifer Lee
(Sociology) — Lee is an affiliated faculty member of Asian American Studies and the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society. Her research and teaching interests lie in the areas of sociology of education, immigration and Asian American Studies.
Alex Lichtenstein
(History) — 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. He is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Michael Martin
(Cinema)—Martin is a professor in cinema and media studies and founder and editor-in-chief of "Black Camera, An International Film Journal" and "Studies in the Cinema of the Black Diaspora." He is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Sylvia Martinez
(Education) — Martinez's research focuses on Latino/a ethnic identity development and high school to college transitions among Latinx youth. She is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Adrian Matejka
(English) — Matejka is a nationally known writer and author of four books of poetry including “The Big Smoke,” a Pulitzer Prize finalist that focused on heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson at the height of American segregation.
Jason McGraw
(History) — McGraw’s research examines emancipation, colonialism, race, and culture in Latin America and the Caribbean. He is the author of "The Work of Recognition: Caribbean Colombia and the Postemancipation Struggle for Citizenship.” McGraw is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Michelle Moyd
(History) — Moyd is a historian of eastern Africa, with special interests in the region’s history of soldiering and warfare. She is currently at work on a book entitled "Africa, Africans, and the First World War," which will examine the spectrum of African experiences in the war, especially as soldiers and workers. She is the associate director of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Mary Murphy
(Psychological and Brain Sciences) — Murphy’s research topics of interest includes: self and social identity threat, stereotype threat, stereotyping and prejudice, interracial interaction and friendship, structural and psychological barriers for underrepresented groups. She is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Ashlyn Nelson
(Public and Environmental Affairs) — Nelson’s research examines the causes and consequences of racial and socioeconomic inequality in the overlapping housing and public education sectors. She is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
John Nieto-Phillips
(History and Vice Provost for Diversity and Inclusion) — Nieto-Phillips has spent the past 25 years researching and teaching transnational histories involving Latinas and Latinos. His research interests are focused on ways that race, language, and education have shaped changing notions of U.S. citizenship and identity. He is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Dina Okamoto
(Sociology) - Okamoto is the director of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society. Her research focuses focuses on the politicalengage ment of immigrants in US society; the evolution of new racial categories such as Asian American; and the impacts of ethnic diversity on intergroup trust and civic life in 21st-century America.
Alberto Ortega
(Public and Environmental Affairs) — Ortega’s work examines how social factors or social policies affect the health or 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. He is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Solimar Otero
(Folklore and Ethnomusicology) — Otero is a folklorist whose research centers on gender, sexuality, Afrolatinx spirituality, and Yoruba traditional religion in folklore, literature, and ethnography. She is the author of "Archives of Conjure: Stories of the Dead in Afrolatinx Cultures," which explores how Afrolatinx spirits guide collaborative spiritual-scholarly activist work through rituals and the creation of material culture. Otero is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Radhika Parameswaran
(Media School) — Parameswaran’s research interests include feminist cultural studies, media globalization, South Asia, and postcolonial studies. Her recent areas of inquiry include colorism and racism in South Asian communities, the transnational production of race, Indian Americans as ethno-racial news workers, and gender and comedy. She is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Tennisha Riley
(Counseling and Psychology) — Riley is an assistant professor in counseling and educational psychology. Her research focuses on understanding the emotional development of Black youth, examining how Black youth’s social context (family, friends, school) influence emotion expression and emotion regulation, as well as the role emotion expression and emotion regulation play in Black youth’s decisions to engage in both risk-related and prosocial behaviors. Her research seeks to expand our foundational knowledge of adolescent emotional development and situate that knowledge within a sociocultural context for Black youth. She is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Alan Roberts
(Psychological and Brain Sciences) — Roberts' research focuses on ethnic differences in standards of attraction, risk for eating disorders, and body dissatisfaction. He is the author of an influential meta-analysis documenting ethnic differences in body satisfaction and has published multiple papers on the ways in which culturally based bodyweight standards differentially impact body dissatisfaction in Black and white women. He is also interested in racial disparities in educational attainment. Roberts is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Fabio Rojas
(Sociology) — 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 and the Black Lives Matter movement. Rojas is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Micol Seigel
(History) — Seigel's research interests include policing, prisons and race in the Americas, especially the US and Brazil; she also teaches about popular culture and postcolonial, racial and queer theory. Seigel is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Sonia Song-Ha Lee
(American Studies and Latino Studies) — Lee is a social, political, and intellectual historian of 20th-century United States, with particular interests in race, ethnicity, social movements, and the history of medicine. She is the author of "Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City." Lee is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Marvin Sterling
(Anthropology) — Sterling’s research interests center on Japan, Jamaica, the African Diaspora, Afro-Asia, race, performance studies, transnationalism and human rights. He is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Alberto Varon
(English) — Varon's research focuses on questions of citizenship, race, and representation in American cultures. Varon is a scholar of Latinx cultures from the 19th century to the present and regularly teach courses in interdisciplinary American and Latinx cultures. He teaches a wide-range of courses on American, Latinx, and ethnic American cultures, focused on the interplay of culture and representation. He is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Brenda Weber
(Gender Studies) — Weber works across the interdisciplinary fields of gender studies, critical media theory, literary theory, and cultural studies, with a focus on media and popular culture's role in shaping, governing and regulating bodies, identities, subjectivities, and differences (gender, sexuality, race, ability, class). She is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Maisha Wester
(American Studies, African American and African Diaspora) — 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. She is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Jakobi Williams
(African American and African Diaspora Studies) — Williams’ research interests are centered on questions of resistance and social justice. His research focuses on African American history, 20th-century U.S. history, Black Panther Party and Black Power/Civil rights movement. He is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Phoebe Wolfskill
(American Studies and African American and African Diaspora Studies) — Wolfskill studies modern and contemporary African American art and images of Blacks in visual culture. Her work considers how art and other visuals have been used as a platform for Black self-reflection, spiritual rumination, political protest, feminist thought, articulations of class struggle and difference, and defiant humor and satire. She is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Joel Wong
(Education) — Wong's research interests are in the areas of Asian/Asian American mental health, the psychology of men and masculinities, and positive psychology (particularly gratitude and encouragement). In particular, he is interested in the intersections of racial, gender, and cultural variables and mental health. He is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Cynthia Wu
(Gender Studies) — 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. Wu is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
Ellen Wu
(History) — Wu’s research grapples with problems of race, citizenship and migration through the lens of Asian American history. Her book “Overrepresented” places Asian Americans at the center of the history of affirmative action to tell a new story about diversity, data, and democracy in the U.S. since the 1960s. She is an affiliate of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.
