Race and Ethnicity: Introduction
Faculty research and teaching interests in race and ethnicity address a range of thematics across national and regional fields and in social, cultural, and political and legal history. These include, for example, the production and operation of categories of racial difference in and across societies; questions of group identities and relations; coerced and voluntary migration; and race and ethnicity as constitutive elements of nation-state formation, colonialism, and communities of diaspora and exile. These issues are framed both in different historical periods, ranging from the early modern period to the present, and at different orders of scale, from colonial systems and regional worlds to the nation-state to subnational and transnational communities. Graduate students who are interested in the study of race, ethnicity, and/or migration typically anchor their work in one major field (e.g., U.S., Latin American, modern European) but transnational or comparative work across fields is particularly encouraged. Students interested in race and ethnicity will also find points of connection with faculty, both in the history department and in other disciplines, with research specialties in nationalism, colonialism, human rights, and post-colonialism.
The Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture is an interdisciplinary site for faculty, students, and visiting scholars interested in the study of race. It emphasizes broadening the study of race beyond the "black-white paradigm" by encouraging scholarly work on other ethnoracial groups, comparative work, intersectionality with other categories of difference and analysis (gender, sexuality, class), and in global and regional perspective. The center sponsors talks by faculty and visiting scholars, cultural programs in connection with community-based projects, and the graduate workshop on the Reproduction of Race and Racial Ideologies. The center also offers annual competitive grants for graduate student research and writing (open to University of Chicago students only) and post-doctoral fellowships (through national competition).
The Human Rights Program in the Center for International Studies is an interdisciplinary project that promotes intellectual inquiry, teaching, and activism on issues pertaining to migrants and refugees, war and genocide, economic development, ethics and law, and other questions involving human rights. The program offers a core three-quarter course sequence on human rights, sponsors summer internships for college and graduate students and hosts visiting activist-fellows, programs, and the workshop on Human Rights.
Graduate students with interests in race and ethnicity participate in various interdisciplinary graduate workshops. In addition to those that are field-specific (e.g. U.S. social history workshop, Latin America, etc.), other workshops are thematically oriented, e.g., the workershops on Reproduction of Race and Racial Ideologies, Human Rights, and Sociologies of Globalization.