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.

Leadership Team

Bill Johnson Gonzalez, Faculty Director
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.

Julie Moody-Freeman, Faculty Director
Julie E. Moody-Freeman is the Director of the Center for Black Diaspora and an Associate Professor in the Department of African and Black Diaspora Studies at DePaul University. She is the co-editor of The Black Imagination, Science Fiction, and the Speculative and The Black Imagination: Science Fiction, Futurism, and the Speculative. Her scholarly essays on Belizean writer Zee Edgell have been published in African Identities, Macomeré, Canadian Women Studies/les cahiers de la femme, and Seeking the Self-Encountering the Other: Diasporic Narrative and the Ethics of Representation. Her work on African American Romance has also appeared in Romance Fiction and American Culture and The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction. Moody-Freeman is also the creator and host of the Black Romance Podcast, which is building an oral history on Black Romance writers.