Araceli Campos
ER&M Class of 1999
Araceli is a first-generation American, with family from rural Mexico and Cuba. A first-generation middle school, high school, college, and law school graduate, she attended Los Angeles public schools before moving to the East Coast for college.
At Yale, Araceli co-founded the major Ethnicity, Race & Migration, and was one of the first four graduates in the program. Araceli went on to graduate from Stanford Law School, where she co-founded the Stanford Journal of Civil Rights/Civil Liberties and was awarded the Public Service Award for her community work and academic achievement.
Today, Araceli continues to bring her commitment to public service, civil rights, and community advocacy to her work. Her career reflects the interdisciplinary education and dedication to social justice that have been central to her work since her time at Yale.
Having Ethnicity, Race & Migration as an available course of study had a significant impact on my life. Not only were the courses very fun (full of discussions constituting some of my fondest memories of Yale), they were extremely substantive.
As a member of the first graduating class of ER&M, I recall how the opportunity added a whole new layer of richness to my Yale education. The caliber of teaching in the ER&M department has always been unsurpassable.The caliber of teaching in the ER&M department has always been unsurpassable: professors like Michael Denning, Patricia Passar, Bryan Hayashi, and of course, the superb Stephen Pitti challenged me intellectually and nurtured me in my evolution as a critical thinker. They pushed us to the full capacity of our potential, teaching us the theoretical bases of racial and ethnic studies, which include the tenets of constitutional equity in our democratic society, and serve to strengthen the very rule of law that I have come to appreciate, as an attorney and a public servant, as precious. They also taught us to apply the theory to broader society, including to the global forces at work in our lives, always asking us to consider practical applications of our learning toward the development of innovative solutions for many of the persisting inequities in the world.
My Yale education, and to great extent, the ER&M major, afforded me a wonderful foundation for understanding in a much more nuanced manner traditional subjects, including history, economics, law, and policy, that I have utilized so much for my life’s work. I remain grateful for this opportunity, and am very encouraged in knowing that future generations of Yale students will get to experience, and in turn, continually innovate (as is fitting) ER&M.
Camila Guiza Chavez
ER&M Class of 2019
Camila majored in Ethnicity, Race and Migration at Yale, CO’19. She gained a passion for organizing with others against injustice by watching the work of her parents and learning from the rich political history of her home, the Bay Area.
After graduating, she stayed in New Haven and helped to build Havenly, a community center for women seeking refuge from colonized or occupied lands.
Eileen Huang
ER&M Class of 2023
Eileen Huang is a writer and digital strategist based in Brooklyn, NY. They graduated from Yale University in 2023 with a B.A. in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration. They harbor a lifelong love for literature and language, and their words can be found in Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, The Kenyon Review, Hyphen, The Adroit Journal, and more. Their writing has been supported by fellowships from The Kenyon Review, the Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets, and the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers. They are primarily interested in writing about Asian American history, queerness, memory, and the internet.
Outside of writing, they’ve worked on creative projects for companies and organizations including Dover Street Market / Comme des Garçons, AWAL, XL Recordings, NBCUniversal, Malala Fund, and more. Their skills include marketing, social media strategy, PR, event production, styling, and creating meticulously curated Spotify playlists. They are currently a social media manager at The New Yorker.
Erin Biel
ER&M Class of 2013
Erin Biel is an assistant general counsel in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), which is responsible for developing and implementing trade policies, overseeing trade negotiations with other countries, and monitoring and enforcing trade laws that create new opportunities for American workers and businesses.
Prior to her current role, she served as an associate at the Washington-based law firm Covington & Burling. Erin has also interned at the USTR’s Office of the General Counsel and Interagency Trade Enforcement Center, the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration at the U.S. State Department.
Erin graduated from Yale in 2013 with a BA in Global Affairs and in Ethnicity, Race and Migration. She earned her JD in 2018 from Yale Law School, where she served as co-editor-in-chief of the Yale Journal of International Law.
Deciding to pursue Ethnicity, Race & Migration has been integral to my academic experience at Yale. I decided to pair the ER&M major with Global Affairs, a selective international studies major that admits approximately 50 students per year.
I have greatly benefited from the multidisciplinary approach that such a curriculum has provided. While I focused on international security and diplomacy in the Global Affairs major, I chose to focus on the areas of cultural anthropology and ethnography in my ER&M classes, providing a nice balance of the macro and micro approaches to understanding the world and its rich diversity.
What I have most valued about the ER&M major are undoubtedly the students and faculty associated with the program. ER&M students have such varied areas of focus, but rather than making the major too disparate, this diversity adds additional flavor to the classes and naturally enhances the learning environment.
Meanwhile, the ER&M faculty are some of the most accessible, passionate, and personable individuals you can find at Yale.
JD Pluecker
ER&M Class of 2000
Jadine (JD) Pluecker works with language, that is, a material thing, a thing of life and history. Her undisciplinary work inhabits the intersections of writing, history, translation, art, interpreting, bookmaking, queer/trans aesthetics, non-normative poetics, language justice, and cross-border cultural production. She has translated numerous books from Spanish.
Jadine has published three books of poetry: The Every Wild (Mouthfeel Press, 2024), Grin Go Home / Las provincias internas (Editorial Ultramarina, 2024), and Ford Over (Noemi Press, 2016). In 2019 Lawndale Art Center supported the publication of the artist book, The Unsettlements: Dad, part of a twelve-year transdisciplinary project begun in 2018 called The Unsettlements.From 2010–2020, she worked as part of the language justice and literary experimentation collaborative Antena Aire. A book of Antena Aire’s selected writings is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse in Fall 2027.
Jadine is a recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writing Grant, and has exhibited work at Artpace, Art Gallery of Guelph, Project Row Houses, and more.
While a student at Yale, I majored in ER&M and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Without the work of generations of activists prior to my arrival at Yale, my studies would never have been possible. I’m extremely grateful for all their efforts to make the university a home for critical thought and progressive politics. The multi/trans/interdisciplinary education I received propelled me to energetic and fruitful work in a variety of arenas, from politics to art to translation to writing.
Julie Gonzales
ER&M Class of 2005
Julie Gonzales is an American politician serving as a member of the Colorado Senate from the 34th district in the City and County of Denver since her election in 2018. She is a progressive member of the Democratic Party.
She has served as Senate majority whip and supported progressive causes including death penalty repeal, abortion rights, and immigrant protections.
Before entering politics, Gonzales was a community organizer and worked at an immigration law firm.
Her work continues to reflect her commitment to immigrant rights, social justice, and strengthening the voices of communities that have historically been underrepresented.
The Ethnicity, Race, and Migration major at Yale gave me tools to dissect, analyze, and challenge power in all its different forms. As a young Chicana, struggling to comprehend the grave injustices confronting my community, working alongside brilliant professors and students alike created an incredible opportunity to use multiple lenses of inquiry and analysis to make sense of the world in a way that honored my community and our shared histories.
Thanks to ER&M, I now have a vocabulary, academic theories, research methodologies, and a framework with which to articulate my ideas and appreciate others. With those tools in hand, I have returned to my community and dedicated my life to transforming the relations of power.
Julie M. Weise
ER&M Class of 2000
Julie Meira Weise is an American historian and Associate Professor of History at the University of Oregon. A Yale graduate, she previously taught at California State University, Long Beach.
Her research focuses on Mexican and Mexican American migration, race, and rights in the United States, particularly the U.S. South. Her book, Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910, received the 2016 Merle Curti Award.
She has also worked extensively in public engagement through podcasts, digital media, and initiatives supporting immigrant and undocumented students.
The best part of the ER&M program was the small and dedicated community of majors and faculty. Even though most of the classes we took were in other disciplines, the structure of the major and particularly the senior seminar allowed us to get to know each other, support each other’s growth, and encourage each other’s questioning.
ER&M was my most important intellectual community in college. The interdisciplinary approach also paid off later in my career:I ended up getting a Ph.D. in History, but was hired to teach in an interdisciplinary program. In ER&M, I learned to ask big questions, appreciate the contributions of different disciplines, and have substantive conversations across different fields. Those are skills I use in my job every day now.
Julius Mitchell
ER&M Class of 2013
Julius Mitchell is an Acting Assistant Professor of Lawyering at NYU. Before joining the NYU Lawyering faculty, Julius was a senior associate at Jenner & Block LLP (New York) in the Investigations, Compliance, and Defense practice.
His pro bono work included cases challenging inhumane prison conditions under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, as well as Fourth Amendment excessive force litigation at the U.S. Supreme Court.
Julius earned his JD from Harvard Law School, where he received the Dean’s Award for Community Leadership for his substantial contribution to the law school.At Harvard, he represented individuals incarcerated in Massachusetts state prisons in disciplinary hearings with the Prison Legal Assistance Project (PLAP) and served as a Supreme Court and Appellate intern at the Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center.
Julius was also article submissions editor for the Harvard Journal of International Law and drafted a report on refugee rights in Kenya as a student in the International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC).
The decision to major in Ethnicity, Race & Migration shed a new light on my undergraduate education. The major privileges its students with the opportunity to rigorously study the human condition through multiple academic disciplines. As an African-American male from a low-income household in Chicago, I found countless compassionate and supportive professors with which to delve deeply into the theories, research methodologies, histories and discourses that frame the everyday challenges of marginalized communities.
Maceo Montoya
ER&M Class of 2002
Maceo Montoya is a California-based author, artist, and professor at UC Davis. He has published fiction, memoir, graphic nonfiction, and poetry, including The Scoundrel and the Optimist, The Deportation of Wopper Barraza, and Chicano Movement for Beginners. His most recent book, Imaginative Possibilities, coauthored with Javier O. Huerta, won the 2025 American Book Award. His paintings, drawings, and prints have been exhibited nationally and internationally, and he has collaborated with numerous writers on visual-textual projects.
Montoya graduated from Yale in 2002 and earned an MFA in visual art from Columbia University in 2006. He teaches Chicanx culture and literature and creative writing at UC Davis and has served as editor of Huizache since 2022.
With its interdisciplinary curriculum ER&M was open to redefining academic boundaries, which included providing a space for alternative approaches to research and documentation. This allowed me to explore more creative outlets and I believe it attracted other students who wished to do the same.
Marisol León
ER&M Class of 2007
Marisol León teaches at Occidental College courses designed for students dedicated to social justice and interested in leveraging the law as a tool for positive social change.
Professor León is a civil rights attorney with the California Department of Justice, where she conducts large-scale civil and criminal investigations and litigates matters related to immigrants’ rights, consumer protection, workers’ rights, conditions of confinement in jails and immigration detention centers, police practices, voting rights, and Title IX.
She previously conducted research and lived with Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers Movement, and worked with Friends of the Earth-Mexico in Chiapas, Mexico, collaborating with social movements organizing against mega-development projects displacing rural communities and undermining Indigenous autonomy.
She has published autobiographical pieces, editorials, and research articles in the Los Angeles Times.
As an undergraduate at Yale, I decided to major in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration to gain access to my own history as a first generation Chicana. The courses I took and the mentorship I received from my ER&M professors immediately fueled my community action work.
Meghanlata Gupta
ER&M Class of 2021
Meghanlata Gupta (Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians) is a second-year student at Yale Law School with interests in federal Indian law, legal affairs journalism, and Native American history. As an ER&M major, she developed her own concentration in Native studies and completed a senior thesis project based on her news platform Indigenizing the News. Outside of class, she was the 2020-2021 president of NISAY and pursued internships with Bridge Michigan and NBC Nightly News.
Before law school, she pursued a master’s degree at Oxford in U.S. history as an Ertegun Scholar and completed a dissertation exploring the history of her tribe’s print newspaper. Now, at law school, she serves as a co-chair for the Native American Law Students Association and enjoys being in the Supreme Court Advocacy Clinic. Last summer, she worked as an intern for NPR Supreme Court correspondent Nina Totenberg.
Nina Mesfin
ER&M Class of 2018
Nina graduated summa cum laude from Yale in 2018 with a degree in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration. While at Yale, she was named a Mellon Mays fellow in her sophomore year, inducted into Phi Beta Kappa as a junior, and, during her final semester, she was awarded a Paul Mellon Fellowship to pursue graduate studies at the University of Cambridge, in England. There, she earned a master’s in Anthropology as well as one in English, with distinction.
Since 2020, Nina has been a fact-checker at The New Yorker magazine, where she has worked on articles ranging from national security probes to celebrity profiles. She is currently based in Brooklyn.
Sarah Stillman
ER&M Class of 2013
Sarah Stillman is a staff writer for The New Yorker whose reporting focuses on social inequality, criminal justice, immigration, and human rights. Her work has covered topics including civil forfeiture, immigrant detention, drug policy, and abuses within the criminal justice system. She has received numerous honors, including the National Magazine Award for Public Interest, the George Polk Award, and the Michael Kelly Award. Stillman has also taught at Yale and directed the Global Migration Program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.Her work combines investigative reporting with a strong focus on the experiences of marginalized communities and the human impact of government policies.
I stumbled into ER&M as my second major almost by accident. Each term, I would scour the Blue Book for classes that excited me, and each term, a large portion of the lectures and seminars on my list would fall under the ER&M umbrella. Many of my favorite professors at Yale – those who thought creatively about how to make the term “interdisciplinary” more than a stock buzzword; those who cared about infusing highbrow theory with a genuine concern for real-world problems – taught courses within ER&M, and I decided to sign up.
Tony Cheng
ER&M Class of 2012
Tony Cheng is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Duke University and is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. His research examines how criminal legal institutions use strategies of legitimation to shape inequalities within communities. His book, The Policing Machine: Enforcement, Endorsements, & the Illusion of Public Input (University of Chicago Press, 2024), explores how police resist institutional reforms by building political capital among community constituents. His research has appeared in leading journals, including American Journal of Sociology, Criminology, Law & Society Review, and Social Problems, and has received awards from major sociological and criminological associations. Cheng earned his PhD in Sociology from Yale University in 2021 and his JD from NYU School of Law in 2018.
Ethnicity, Race, & Migration has fundamentally shaped the lens and language through which I view and discuss history, current events, and all the newsworthy and daily activities around me. Not only were my assumptions about race and ethnicity challenged, but in return, I also learned to confront and problematize the assumptions that many in our society hold in regards to who holds power and why. I reviewed the ways racial, sexual, cultural, and other minorities have protested inequalities and hypothesized about the strategies they can use in the future