Announcing Graduate Admissions for a Critical Ethnic Studies Cohort for Fall 2024

In collaboration with our partnering departments, programs, and collectives in the Center for Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (RIDGS), the Department of American Studies at the University of Minnesota is recruiting a graduate cohort in Critical Ethnic Studies for this admissions cycle. Importantly, our general (non-cohort related) admissions remain open, and the Critical Ethnic Studies cohort will form part of the students admitted this academic year. Indeed, any prospective applicant's work (irrespective of interest in Critical Ethnic Studies) will need to align with one or more general areas of American Studies focus–like ethnography;  textual analysis; oral histories; political economy; transnationalism; regionalism and rurality; Indigenous studies; Black studies; Latinx studies; Asian American studies; Filipinx studies; archipelagic and hemispheric studies; queer studies; gender studies; popular culture–while being mindful of intersections with specific nuances of core and affiliated faculty expertise. For those applicants interested in Critical Ethnic Studies, we encourage them to indicate and outline in the statement of purpose how their research agenda in Critical Ethnic Studies aligns with American Studies at the University of Minnesota. In particular, and following the work of the Critical Ethnic Studies Editorial Collective (2016), we are interested in Critical Ethnic Studies applicants who hold an “intellectual excitement that is inseparable from the social-historical violences that have produced and necessitated such study [i.e., Critical Ethnic Studies];” and who consider Critical Ethnic Studies as an intellectually and politically urgent mode of inquiry and form of engagement that draws on, bridges, and renders anew an array of fields and disciplines like (but not limited to):

• Indigenous studies

• Settler colonialism

• Black studies

• Chicanx & Latinx studies

• Asian American studies

• Arab American studies

• Pacific island studies

• Caribbean studies

• Critical refugee studies

• Queer of color and queer diasporic critique

• Trans* studies and trans of color critique

• Women of color and transnational feminisms

• Critical disability studies and crip of color critique

• Critical geographies and ecologies

• Critical education studies

• Transnational and transracial adoption

• Comparative and relational race studies

• Abolition and carcerality

• Abolitionist/Critical university studies

• Neoliberalism

• (Im)migration

• Empire, war, militarism, and occupation

• Slavery and its afterlives