About

Philosophy of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies

CRES aspires to prepare students for careers and lives intervening in structural racism by focusing on how agents for racial equality have navigated these systemic challenges in the past and in our contemporary times. In doing so, we combine the structural focus of Critical Race Theory, the agentive and communal perspective of Ethnic Studies, and the resistance against subjugation (including subjugated knowledge) of Decolonial Studies, in order to expand beyond these three disciplines as we face the challenges posed by the 21st century. Given that the legacies and realities of racism threaten all arenas of public and private life, the vision of CRES is to extend the work of these fields to all fields by bringing together experts from the humanities, the social sciences, the natural sciences, mathematics, and the arts. 

Faculty Accomplishments 

Carmen Alvaro Jarrín is a former Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and won the Marysa Navarro Book Prize and an honorable mention for the Michelle Rosaldo Book Prize for their first book, The Biopolitics of Beauty: Cosmetic Citizenship and Affective Capital in Brazil (University of California Press, 2017). They were the recipient of a Mellon/ACLS Recent Doctoral Recipient Fellowship. 

Sarah Klotz is the author of Writing Their Bodies: Restoring Rhetorical Relations at the Carlisle Indian School (Utah State University Press 2021) and publishes regularly in the fields of Native American Rhetoric, Anti-Racist Writing Assessment and Pedagogies, and Early American Literature. She is the winner of the 2016 CCCC/NCTE Emergent Researcher Award and a 2022 Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation Teaching Fellowship. 

Nadine M. Knight is a Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellow and a HERS Leadership Institute alumna. She has contributed to the Choice Outstanding Academic Book (2019), Black Cultural Production After Civil Rights (ed. Robert J. Patterson) and published scholarly works on The Wire, The Underground Railroad, African American reinterpretations of Classical literature, Civil War memory. She published a personal narrative about racial identity for The Beiging ofAmerica (2Leaf Press, 2017). 

Jorge Santos is the winner of The Comics Study Society Charles Hatfield Book Prize (2019) and CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title (2019) for his first book, Graphic Memories of the Civil Rights Movement: Reframing History with Comics; Best Online Comics Studies Scholarship (BOCSS) Finalist (October 2016) and First Place, Aetna Critical Writing Prize (October 2013) for “Movement through The Borderlands and Graphic Revisions in Rhode Montijo’s Pablo’s Inferno.”