Natalia Molina is Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is the author of two award-winning books, How Race Is Made in America:  Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts and Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1940, and co-editor of Relational Formations of Race: Theory, Method and Practice. Her new book Placemaking at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant in Los Angeles Nourished its Community will be published by University of California Press in 2022, and she is currently writing about the history of Mexican workers at the Huntington Library and Gallery in Los Angeles. A 2020 MacArthur Fellow, she has also won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Ford, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations.

The 2021-2022 Altman Program invites the Miami University community to explore the persistence of racism in its cultural, political, and institutional forms. What is the history of race as an idea and a social category? How did it transform systems of law, administration, and representation into vehicles for subjugating entire groups of people? How does racism work today? What is its relation to systems of caste and meritocracy? To citizenship and mobility? How can emerging humanities scholarship help us interrogate its evolution and frustrating persistence? And what measures can we take to create a more inclusive and equitable society?