Photo of Reuben Jonathan Miller
Reuben Jonathan Miller Areas of Study: Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity
Associate Professor, Harris School of Public Policy and Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity

Reuben Jonathan Miller is an Associate Professor in the University of Chicago Crown Family School and in the Department of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity, and a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. His research, which focuses on race, punishment, and social welfare policy is published in journals across the social sciences. Learn more about Professor Miller.

Teaching Fellow

Kevin Irakoze is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Philosophy, the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity, and in the College. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Chicago in 2024. He also earned graduate certificates in gender and sexuality studies, as well as college teaching. He works primarily in practical philosophy at the nexus of ethics and political philosophy. His general guiding question is on how to live well amid severely adverse political situations. His dissertation, “Transfigurative Imagination: Reclaiming Meaning and Agency in African Political Life,” clarified the ethical, existential, and political implications of the reality of political failure and argued for forms of imagination and agency that best fit the context, that is, a transfigurative imagination with an ability to open up new ways of seeing reality and a protest attitude that exceeds the limits of political inertia. On the foundation of this scholarship, one of his current research projects is on political virtues, offering a critique of a functional view in which individual character serves the ends of specific forms of government, and building an alternative view which asserts the priority of an individual ethical perspective on politics. Two other current research projects are in race and sexuality: a conception of hope in the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois and a meditation on antiqueer violence in Africa through the perspective of human personhood.

Photograph of Claudia Brittenham
Claudia Brittenham Areas of Study: Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity
Professor of Art History and the College, Ancient American Art, Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity; Interim Director, Center for Latin American Studies

Professor Brittenham studies the the art made by Indigenous people in Mesoamerica before and in the decades immediately after the Spanish invasion. My work involves reckoning with the ways that colonial frameworks shape every aspect of my discipline, from the concept of art and the hierarchies it reinforces, to the definition of Mesoamerica as a culture area and the way it obscures the interconnectedness of Indigenous communities across national borders. 

Read more about Professor Brittenham here.

Photograph of Uahikea Maile
Uahikea Maile Areas of Study: Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity
Assistant Professor of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity

Uahikea Maile is a Kanaka Maoli scholar, activist, and practitioner from Maunawili, O’ahu. His research interests include history, law, and activism on Hawaiian sovereignty; Indigenous critical theory; settler colonialism; political economy; feminist and queer theories; and decolonization.

Read more about Professor Maile here.

Professor of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity

Jodi Byrd’s research focuses on indigenous studies, indigenous feminist and queer studies, and video game studies.

Read more about Professor Byrd here.

Eve Ewing
Eve L. Ewing Areas of Study: Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity
Associate Professor Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity

Professor Ewing draws upon empirical evidence, archival sources, and artistic production to construct a critical imaginary theorizing Black life in the United States at the intersections of history and possibility, with a particular interest in the lives of young people and in schools as sites of ideological production. Learn more about her work here. Read more about Professor Ewing here.

Photo credit: Mercedes Zapata

Associate Professor of Sociology

Professor Bell's research agenda deals with race, work & organizations, and social movements. Her first line of work—in the area of race, social movements, and the professions—is primarily concerned with how resistance to racism shapes the professions.

Read more about Professor Bell here.

Arthur and Joann Rasmussen Professor; Associate Chair, Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity

Professor Auslander's field specialties include nineteenth- and twentieth-century European social and cultural history with a focus on France and Germany; material culture, everyday life, and the built environment; Jewish history; gender history and theory; race in the Atlantic world; and colonial and postcolonial Europe 

Read more about Professor Auslander here.