Sept. 7, 2021

Welcome and welcome back! The excitement on campus is palpable. After 18 long months of remote classes and events, students and faculty have returned to Morningside campus, eager to engage with one another in-person. The Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race welcomes you back for Fall 2021. We are ready with new classes and events that continue to promote study and organizing around issues of ethnicity, race, and racism. It’s been a difficult year and a half—some of us became ill and many of us lost family members or friends to the virus. The hardship of isolation and remote work weighed on us all. The pandemic laid bare and exacerbated social contradictions, from the disparities in health care for communities of color to the special burden carried by “essential workers,” many of them immigrants and people of color, to racial violence by police and white supremacists, including the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis to the Asian spa workers in Atlanta. So we return to campus with renewed purpose to educate and advocate.

We are delighted to announce several new permanent faculty additions to the Center:

• Dr. Bahia Munem, a scholar of Arab and Muslim refugees and communities in the Americas;
• Prof. Shana Redmond, a scholar of Black music and culture;
• Prof. Michael Witgen, a scholar of native/Indigenous North American history.

We welcome also these new lecturers:

• Dr. Viola Lasmana, an ACLS fellow last year, returns this year as a Lecturer and will be offering classes in Asian American studies and transpacific media studies;
• Dr. Ellen Crane Shaw joins us as a new member of the Society of Fellows. She’ll be teaching a course on race and policing in the Fall and a section of Colonization/Decolonization in the Spring.
• Dr. Jessica Lee of the Democracy and Citizenship project in American Studies will teach a course on immigration history in the Spring.
• Dr. Brian Luna Lucero, the digital projects librarian for Columbia Libraries, will teach a course on U.S. Latinx history in the Spring.

See faculty profiles here.

See here for classes offered this Fall.

We are excited to announce at least two major events for the Fall:

• Honoring Dr. Mabel Lee (Barnard 1906 and PhD in Economics, Columbia, 1921), a women’s
  suffrage activist and leader in NYC Chinatown – Nov. 8 at 6 PM – hybrid event in person for CU
  affiliates at Heyman Center and online for others.
• Tommy Orange, award-winning Native American writer, author of There There – Dec. 2 at 7:30
  (with Columbia oral history program) – virtual event.
• Plus our ongoing Latinx poetry and Asian American Diasporic writers series – stay tuned for
  details.

And coming in the Spring:

• US Latinx History symposium, April 22 – featuring George Sánchez, Steven Pitti, Rosina Lozano, Monica Martinez, Gerry Cadava, Julio Capó, Lori Flores, and Alex La Rotta
• Indigenous Language Rights in Latin America – TBA
• Salsa and Prisons – TBA

We will be reviving the CSER Student council – details coming soon!

As we gather back on campus, in classrooms and at the Center, we remind everyone of the importance of adhering to covid19 precautions. The pandemic is not over. The University has created as safe an environment as possible, that allows us to return to campus this Fall. Protect yourself and our community. See here for guidelines and information.

In peace and solidarity,

Karl Jacoby and Mae Ngai, CSER Co-Directors

About our co-directors: Mae Ngai, who was on leave last academic year finishing up her new book, The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics, is back at CSER this year, while Karl Jacoby will be on leave as a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Many thanks to Professor Jacoby and CSER staff Josephine Caputo, Raymond Garcia, and Matt Sandler for helping CSER get through this past year.