School of Arts and Sciences
Department of Studies in Race Colonialism and Diaspora

Faculty

Faculty

Core Faculty

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Kevin Dunn

Associate Professor and Interim Chair of the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora
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Sarah Fong

Mellon Assistant Professor
American studies; Critical ethnic studies; Comparative racial formations; Racial capitalism; US Colonialisms
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Kerri Greenidge

Mellon Associate Professor
African American History and African Diasporic History; African American Intellectual and Political Thought; African American and African Diasporic Literatures; African American and African Diasporic Histories / Literatures of New England
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AB Huber

Senior Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies
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Mary Amanda McNeil

Mellon Assistant Professor
Black studies; Native American and Indigenous studies; Afro-Native studies; women, gender, and sexuality studies; social history; and geography.
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Courtney Sato

Mellon Assistant Professor
Dr. Sato's first book, Pacific Internationalisms, offers the first full-length study on interwar Pacific internationalism and the transnational Asian and Asian American activists engaged in Pacific internationalist ideologies. Dr. Sato's next project examines Japanese American tuberculosis patients confined in segregated sanatoria during WWII and the gendered care of tuberculosis nursing and healthcare. Dr. Sato previously served as the Co-PI and Project Director for the Out of the Desert digital project (https://outofthedesert.yale.edu) which interprets World War II Japanese American incarceration history for a broad public audience.
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Dorothy Wang

Associate Professor

Affiliate Faculty

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Amahl Bishara

Professor
Media, journalism, the Middle East, expressivity, human rights, knowledge production, democracy, ethnography of place My research revolves around expression, space, media, and settler colonialism. I am currently working on two book projects. The first, tentatively entitled "Permission to Converse: Laws, Bullets, and other Roadblocks to a Palestinian Exchange," addresses the relationship between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank, two groups that are positioned slightly differently in relation to Israeli settler-colonialism. Through ethnographies of protest as well as of more everyday forms of expression, I analyze the barriers to these two groups speaking to and with each other. I argues that speech is always an embodied and emplaced act. My second ongoing project examines Palestinian popular politics in a West Bank refugee camp. It examines how Palestinians in this refugee camp strive to resist three authorities, the Israeli occupation, the Palestinian Authority administration, and the United Nations Relief Works Agency through struggles over land, water, bodies, and expression. My first book, Back Stories: U.S. News Production and Palestinian Politics (Stanford University Press 2013) is an ethnography of production of US news during the second Palestinian Intifada. It asks what we can learn about journalism and popular political action when we place Palestinian journalists at the center of an inquiry about U.S. journalism. In addition to academic writing, I also regularly write for such outlets as Jadaliyya, Middle East Report. I have produced the documentary "Degrees of Incarceration" (2010), an hour-long documentary that explores how, with creativity and love, a Palestinian community responds to the crisis of political imprisonment. Finally, I have been involved with the production of bilingual Arabic and English children's books about refugee lives, including The Boy and the Wall.
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Freeden Blume Oeur

Associate Professor
My research engages feminist and humanist insights to enrich a Sociology in the tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois, one committed to understanding the persistence of anti-Black racism today.
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Heather Curtis

Warren S. Woodbridge Professor in Comparative Religions
Global Christianity American Religious History Religion, Humanitarianism and Philanthropy Religion, Health and Healing Evangelical, Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity Religion and Reform Movements Gender and Women's Studies in Religion
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Kendra Field

Associate Professor
U.S., African American, Native American, family history and the history of genealogy
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Daanika Gordon

Associate Professor
Law, the criminal legal system, and policing; racial inequality and racial formation; urban politics, cities, and space; bureaucracy and organizations; research methods
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Kareem Khubchandani

Associate Professor and Interim Department Chair of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies
Performance Studies; queer studies; South Asian studies
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Diana Martinez

Assistant Professor
American architecture history, global architecture history, post-colonial studies, materiality
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Lily Mengesha

Fletcher Foundation Assistant Professor of Dramatic Literature
Critical Indigenous Studies, Performance Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies
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Catherine Peters

Visiting Scholar
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Kamran Rastegar

Professor
Comparative literature, film studies, modern Arabic literature, modern Persian literature, memory studies, postcolonial studies I study Persian and Arabic literary history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My first book Literary Modernity between Europe and the Middle East (Routledge, 2009) explored the origins of the conception of literary modernity in Arabic and Persian literatures, a topic that I have further addressed in articles and as editor of a special issue of the journal Middle Eastern Literatures and in articles and chapters for edited volumes. Second, I research the role of cinema and visual culture in the formation of cultural memory in conflict and post-conflict social settings, with specific interests in the histories of Iran, Lebanon, Palestine and Algeria. This research is reflected in my second book, Surviving Images: Cinema, War and Cultural Memory in the Middle East (Oxford UP, 2015). I am currently completing a critical study of the cinema of the Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman, under contract with Wallflower/Columbia University Press.
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Adriana Zavala

Professor
Modern and Contemporary U.S. Latinx and Mexican art; Latin American art; Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora

Emeriti Faculty

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Jean Wu

Senior Lecturer Emerita
Asian American studies; anti-racist education; community-based action