The Program in Race, Migration, and Indigeneity welcomes two new program directors.
Jennifer C. Lee has begun serving as Interim Director of Asian American Studies. She is an associate professor in Sociology and an affiliated faculty member of Asian American Studies and the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Minnesota in 2007. Her research and teaching interests lie in the areas of Sociology of Education, Immigration, and Asian American Studies. With grants and fellowships from the National Academy of Education, the Spencer Foundation, and the American Educational Research Association, Jennifer has examined how the educational and occupational experiences and outcomes of Asian and Latino children of immigrants are influenced by co-ethnic communities and bilingual proficiency. Her current research examines Asian immigrants’ employment in ethnic economies, as well as attitudes towards Asian Americans and Asian-owned businesses.
Susan Alt has begun serving as Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies. She is a professor in the department of Anthropology and faculty curator at the Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois in 2006. Her research and teaching interests lie in examining the effects of religion, migration and gender in Native American Societies in the pre-Columbian Mid-west. Grants from the NSF, NEH and John Templeton Foundation have funded her collaborative archaeological research projects examining the development of urbanism at the Native American City of Cahokia. Her current research combines archaeology, ethnohistory and Native American teachings to looks at the effects of landscapes, particularly those of karst and water in religious and political formulations in Ancient North America.
We thank the previous directors of these respective programs, Ellen Wu and Brian Gilley, for their service and wish them well with their new plans.
The College of Arts