On Monday, OMSA and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture will host professors Ramon A. Gutierrez, Raul Coronado, Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, Julie Saville, Matthew Briones, and Mario Small. They will engage in a conversation about the experience of scholars of color and share their journeys to their present positions at the University of Chicago. They will also discuss topics including obstacles faced by scholars of color, isolation affecting scholars of color, stereotyping of research conducted by scholars of color, and sources of personal motivation.
Ramon A. Gutiérrez
Preston & Sterling Morton Distinguished Service Professor in United States History and the College; Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture
Gutiérrez, one of the nation’s leading Latino scholars, has received numerous academic awards, including a MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship (“genius” grant), the John Hope Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association and the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize from the Organization of American Historians.
He is a specialist in Mexican-American history, Indian-White relations in the Americas, social and economic history of the Southwest, colonial Latin America and Mexican immigration. In addition to two monographs and numerous articles, he has edited, co-edited or co-authored 10 books.
Raúl Coronado
Assistant Professor, Department of EnglishRaúl Coronado's teaching and research interests are in Latina/o literary and cultural history, from the colonial period to the 1940s with an emphasis on rethinking the literature of the Americas in a transnational, hemispheric framework. His teaching focuses on the historical specificities of the U.S.-Mexico border and the literary and cultural legacies of modernity and colonialism in the Americas. His next book project will be on the historical emergence of queer Latina/o subjectivities with a particular focus on how women of color have theorized the queer subject.
Agnes Lugo-Ortiz
Associate Professor, Latin American Literature
Agnes Lugo-Ortiz is a specialist in nineteenth-century Latin American literature, and in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Caribbean cultural history. Her work focuses on questions concerning the relationships between cultural production and the formation of modern socio-political identities. This is the subject of her book Identidades imaginadas: Biografía y nacionalidad en el horizonte de la guerra (Cuba 1860-1898) and of her current book-length project "Riddles of Modern Identity: Biography and Visual Portraiture in Slaveholding Cuba (1760-1886)." Since 1994 she has been on the advisory board of the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Project. She is also the coordinator of the Humanities Division's Project Towards a New Americas Studies.
Julie Saville
Associate Professor of History
Associate Professor, Latin American LiteratureAgnes Lugo-Ortiz is a specialist in nineteenth-century Latin American literature, and in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Caribbean cultural history. Her work focuses on questions concerning the relationships between cultural production and the formation of modern socio-political identities. This is the subject of her book Identidades imaginadas: Biografía y nacionalidad en el horizonte de la guerra (Cuba 1860-1898) and of her current book-length project "Riddles of Modern Identity: Biography and Visual Portraiture in Slaveholding Cuba (1760-1886)." Since 1994 she has been on the advisory board of the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Project. She is also the coordinator of the Humanities Division's Project Towards a New Americas Studies.
Julie Saville
Associate Professor of HistoryJulie Saville's research and teaching are focused on plantation societies of the southern United States and regions of the Caribbean from the 18th through the 20th centuries. She is especially interested in how broad historical changes during the era of trans-Atlantic slave emancipations are related to daily life, the social relations of labor, and popular forms of political expression.
Matthew Briones
Assistant Professor of American History and the College
Professor Matthew Briones' first book manuscript is driven by an interest in the interactions between Asian Americans and African Americans; focusing primarily on the home front culture of World War II, his monograph interrogates the ways in which different racialized and ethnic groups interacted during a heightened sense of possibility for an American multiracial democracy. Professor Briones' second project unearths the history of the first Filipino settlement in 18th-century Louisiana. One of the goals of this second project is to raise the profile of Filipino American history and its intersections with Latina/o history.
Mario Small
Professor of Sociology
Professor Small’s research interests include urban poverty, inequality, culture, networks, case study methods, and higher education. He is currently working on several projects dealing with urban conditions, organizations, and networks. One is a study of how the ability of low-income women to access to resources—information, goods, services, social networks—is shaped by their membership or participation in organizations. A second project investigates the availability of day-to-day organizations—such as pharmacies, banks, grocery stores, hardware stores, childcare centers—in neighborhoods of different poverty levels. A third project, still in its early stages, examines how friendships are shaped by the social contexts in which they are formed and sustained.
