Message from the Director

It is my pleasure to welcome you to the second annual newsletter of the School of Languages, Cultures, and Race at WSU. We took a year off from publishing here to focus on a variety of changes and challenges affecting the School, the most impactful being the University-wide shift to remote teaching and working due to the global pandemic. In this issue, you’ll find several short articles about many of the outstanding people, programs, and recent activities that make SLCR unique, dynamic, and forward moving.

SLCR is dedicated to the study of language, literature, society, race, and cultures, both nationally and globally, and our now three-year-old school continues to grow and develop. We currently have three cohorts of PhD students in American Studies, a new Lecture Series, and several new professors, assistant professors, and lecturers. We also continue to make changes to our curriculum to best serve and meet the needs of our students across our 25 major- and minor-degree undergraduate programs and our PhD program. To give you a more concrete idea, our degrees span several diverse and complementary areas, including American Indian Studies, American Studies, Chinese, Comparative Ethnic Studies, Popular Culture, Film Studies, French, German, Hispanic Studies, Humanities, Japanese, Latin American Studies, Social Sciences, and Spanish.

The School is now home to more than 30 faculty across three campuses of the WSU system whose areas of research include race, racial identity and racism, cultural productions of 9/11, food sovereignty and justice, language acquisition and language pedagogy, popular culture, literature, translation, cultural politics of sport, gender and sexuality, technologies of time and space, and social justice

SLCR faculty, along with our staff, and advisors, are dedicated to providing highest-quality education and support for every student to succeed in the classroom and beyond. Among outreach and events planned for the school year, we are looking forward to another installment of our Lecture Series in fall 2021 and to the Art for Social Change competition the following spring.

As we continue to work on new and ongoing projects, please know that your support and encouragement means the world to us.

Thank you and enjoy a happy, healthy year!

Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo
Director of SLCR
Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies
clugo@wsu.edu