Center for the Study of Race & Race Relations

Dr. Katheryn Russell-Brown

Director

Dr. Russell-Brown was named the CSRRR director in 2003. She is also the Levin, Mabie & Levin Professor of Law. Her research and writing focus on race and crime. The second edition of her book, The Color of Crime (NYU Press) was published in 2009.
russellbrownk@law.ufl.edu

Dr. Diedre F. Houchen

Post-Doctoral Associate

Dr. Houchen became the CSRRR Postdoctoral Associate in 2016. She has taught race and education, history of education, and teacher education courses in University of Florida’s College of Education. Her research and writing focuses on race, education and history. Her work as a youth advocate, program developer, middle and high school teacher and teacher educator deepened her understanding of the challenges facing public education.She is published in the areas of urban education, teaching, and learning. Her current work considers Black teacher activism and pedagogy during Jim Crow.
diedre@ufl.edu

Stephanie Bornstein

Professor Stephanie Bornstein teaches and writes in the areas of antidiscrimination law, employment and labor law, and civil procedure. Her scholarship focuses on legal and administrative strategies to reduce racial and gender inequality in the workplace and ensure access to justice in civil litigation. Bornstein’s work has been cited in enforcement efforts by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP). From 2019-2020, Bornstein served as the Chair of the AALS Section on Employment Discrimination Law. For its 10th edition, forthcoming in 2021, she will join as co-author of a leading casebook in the field, Sullivan & Zimmer’s CASES & MATERIALS ON EMPLOYMENT DISCRIMINATION (Aspen).

Nancy Dowd

Professor Nancy Dowd’s scholarship focuses on children and families, race and gender equality, critical race and feminist theory, juvenile justice, fatherhood, and non-marital families. Her list of recent books and publications is on the UF website. Her most recent book, Reimagining Equality: A New Deal for Children of Color (2018) is an indepth examination of the life course of African American boys from birth to age 18, as a means to explore race and gender inequalities among children. In that work she has developed the concept of developmental equality, a means to achieve equality for those children at the bottom of the hierarchies among children with respect to support and development to insure equal opportunity as adults. Her current project is a collaboration with Dr. Margaret Beale Spencer, a renowned developmental scientist, to re-read Brown v. Board of Education, a project they call “Radical Brown.”

Berta E. Hernandez-Truyol

Professor Berta E. Hernández-Truyol is the Levin Mabie & Levin Professor of Law and Associate Director of the Center on Children and Families. She is an internationally renowned human rights scholar who teaches international law, human rights, trade and globalization. Her scholarship focuses on the intersections of sex, race, gender, sexuality, culture, and other traits that render some populations marginable. In a recent book project, she utilized a critical human rights paradigm to unveil injustice and to seek to provide methodological tools to remedy inequality and eradicate prejudice in the global community – both in the U.S. and internationally.

Darren Hutchinson

Professor Darren Hutchinson is the Raymond & Miriam Ehrlich Eminent Scholar Chair and Professor of Law. He teaches and writes about constitutional law, civil rights litigation, law and social movements, LGBT rights, and critical race theory. He has written extensively on the Supreme Court’s equal protection doctrine. His research addresses legal questions from an interdisciplinary perspective, utilizing social science materials to analyze the law with greater complexity.

Michelle Jacobs

Professor Michelle Jacobs is a full Professor of Law. She teaches Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, White Collar Crime, Critical Race Theory, International Criminal Law, and a seminar, Criminal Law in the Virtual Context, which examines how technological development creates intersections between traditional civil law and criminal law. Her scholarship interests include access to justice for poor and under served communities, race and the criminal justice system including issues of violent policing in Black communities; women defendants in the criminal justice system with a special interest in incarcerated women survivors of intimate partner violence.

Maryam Jamshidi

Professor Jamshidi teaches and writes in the areas of national security, public international law, the law of foreign relations, and tort law. Her scholarship examines how private law shapes and is transformed by public laws touching on national security and international law matters, as well as the relationship between national security laws and accountability. In exploring these dynamics, Professor Jamshidi’s work draws on political and critical theory, as well as sociology. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Washington University Law Review, the Southern California Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, and the University of Colorado Law Review. She also regularly publishes in popular media outlets. Her most recent scholarship examines how legalized discrimination in national security law impacts political efforts at Executive accountability.

Shani King

Professor Shani King is an active scholar who writes and teaches in the areas of international human rights, children’s rights and family law; the role of children’s counsel in various contexts; family autonomy in traditionally underserved populations; immigration law and legal ethics.  Professor King’s scholarship focuses on urgent contemporary issues involving juvenile justice, dependency, immigration and international and domestic children’s rights, especially as they impact the lives of African-American and Latino children.

Pedro A. Malavet

Professor Pedro A. Malavet has published multiple law review articles and one book on the constitutional relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico and uses Critical Race Theory to illustrate the racialization of Latinas/os generally in the U.S. and specifically on how that affects the citizenship rights of the largest group of U.S. territorial citizens: Puerto Ricans. These writings illuminate how Latinas/os are homogenized into a single non-white, non-citizen “race” in both the popular imagination and in American legal and political discourse. These tropes and the accompanying discrimination make it difficult for Latinas and Latinos to fully exercise our citizenship and even fundamental human rights in the U.S.

Jason Nance

Jason P. Nance is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. He teaches Education Law, Remedies, Torts, and Introduction to the Legal Profession. He focuses his research and writing on racial inequalities in the public education system, school discipline, implicit racial bias, the school-to-prison pipeline, students’ rights, and the legal profession. His scholarship has been published in numerous journals, cited by several courts, party and amicus briefs, law journals, books, treatises, and education and other social science journals, and featured in numerous national media outlets. Professor Nance served as the reporter for the American Bar Association’s Joint Task Force on Reversing the School-to-Prison Pipeline, where he co-authored a report and proposed resolutions for the ABA to adopt to help dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline nationwide.

Kenneth B. Nunn

Professor Kenneth B. Nunn is Co-founder of CSRRR, Assistant Director of the Criminal Justice Center, Associate Director of the Center on Children and Families and Professor of Law. He teaches criminal law and procedure. His research interests include African and African-centered thought, cultural studies, legal semiotics, and Critical Race Theory. In his research he employs a number of critical theories to explore the intersection of race and criminal justice. He was a consulting editor for the MacMillan Encyclopedia of Race and Racism and a contributor to the World Book Encyclopedia on race, racism and related topics.