ER&M Chair Announcement

ER&M logo
May 2, 2019

Founded in 1997, Yale’s Ethnicity, Race, and Migration Program has long educated students, supported postdoctoral fellows, and advanced research related to indigenous and ethnic studies, global migrations and displacement, and critical race, anti-colonial, and cultural analysis. We have proudly been a center of transformative scholarship and teaching, and we have pressed for the expansion of transdisciplinary programs, new graduate initiatives, and public partnerships.

Our faculty withdrew their labor from the program earlier this term when we felt this work was unsustainable. As Chair, I am pleased to announce that ER&M has received new institutional status and permanence that will allow us to recommit to the Program. On behalf of my colleagues, I thank the Yale administration for affirming ER&M’s importance as a program that requires resources and standing on par with other academic units. We appreciate the efforts of President Peter Salovey, Dean Tamar Gendler, Dean Marvin Chun, Dean Amy Hungerford, and Dean Alan Gerber to ensure that ER&M will receive support to fulfill its mandate.

I take great joy in imagining the future of the Ethnicity, Race, and Migration Program at Yale and our new capacity to partner with institutions and colleagues beyond this University. I am grateful that our faculty remains committed to teaching and mentoring students interested in what has become one of our university’s most dynamic and fastest growing undergraduate majors.

We are deeply grateful to members of the Yale community and the thousands of educators and others worldwide who have supported the Ethnicity, Race, and Migration Program. We received remarkable affirmations of the importance of our collective work and have formed new relationships in the process. We are especially indebted to the ER&M undergraduate and graduate students who have demonstrated their deep investment in the program and one another. The remarkable work and aspirations of our students and colleagues will enliven Ethnicity, Race, and Migration in the years to come.

Alicia Schmidt Camacho
Chair, Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University