Leadership Team and Steering Committee

The STRC is co-led by the Directors of the Center for Black Diaspora and the Center for Latino Research in collaboration with a Steering Committee composed of representatives from the Collaborative's core academic units and the LAS Dean's Office.

Bill Johnson González is an Associate Professor in the English Department, Director of the Center for Latino Research at DePaul University, and the Editor in Chief of Diálogo, a peer reviewed journal of Latinx and Latin American Studies. His teaching and research interests include multilingualism in Latinx literature, Latinx film, and contemporary queer cultural production. He has published work on multilingualism in the Chicana novel in differences: a feminist journal, and on queer Chicano film in GLQ. He is the co-editor of Passing Lines: Sexuality and Immigration (Harvard UP, 2005) as well as of The Surprise of Otherness: A Barbara Johnson Reader (Duke UP, 2014), and is currently completing a translation of Aventuras de un bracero, the only novel known to have been written by a bracero.

Francesca T. Royster is Professor of English at DePaul University. She is the Director of DePaul’s Center for Black Diaspora, and co-directs the Social Transformation Research Collaborative.At DePaul, she teaches courses on African American Literature, Queer Writers of Color and Writing About Music. She’s written creative and scholarly work on Shakespeare, Black country music performers and fans, Prince, Beyoncé, Tracy Chapman, queer utopias and chosen family, among other topics. Her books include Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon (Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era (University of Michigan Press, 2013), Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions (University of Texas Press, 2022), and Choosing Family: A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance (Abrams/ Overlook Press, 2023). Among her awards, Black Country Music won the 2023 Ralph Gleason Music Books First Prize from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the 2023 ARSC Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research​, the 2023 Judy Tsou Critical Race Studies Award, from The American Musicological Society and the 2023 Woody Guthrie Award for most Outstanding Book on Popular Music by the International Association of Popular Music Studies- US. She’s currently at work on a new book on Tracy Chapman.