Director's Welcome Message

Welcome to Stanford's CENTER FOR COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN RACE & ETHNICITY

I am so proud to be taking over as Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity as it moves into its second quarter century. Without a doubt, CCSRE has been at the core of my intellectual formation; I arrived at Stanford as a first-year Assistant Professor in 1996 which, fatefully for me, was the first year CCSRE came into existence. Since then, I have participated in so many of the different activities sponsored by the Center, including leading the Undergraduate Program and Directing the Research Institute, that I can hardly imagine my life at Stanford, or my scholarship, without it. Even as I have moved through the ranks, CCSRE has grown into a university-wide research and teaching center with over 150 affiliated faculty from 28 departments and 6 schools. It offers undergraduate degrees in Asian American, Chicana/o/x-Latino/a/x, Native American, Jewish, and Comparative Race Studies; a Ph.D. Minor; 200+ courses; and multiple student fellowships. We have become a leader in research, publication, training, policy engagement and public education on diverse topics including art, criminal justice, artificial intelligence, race and inequality. As a participant and leader of CCSRE, I am proud of our successes, and I celebrate them!

And yet we find ourselves, in 2021, in a rapidly changing and difficult world. We face challenges ranging from increasing economic inequality to an overdue racial reckoning and what appears to be irreversible climate change. As we move forward, understanding how race and ethnicity stem from and exacerbate these problems remains key to our attempts to solve them. I look forward to working with CCSRE’s talented faculty, staff, postdocs, and graduate and undergraduate students as we collectively confront our demanding and exciting future.

Paula M. L. Moya
Faculty Director of CCSRE
Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor of the Humanities
Professor, by courtesy, of Iberian and Latin American Cultures