About the Director

Dr. Arlene Torres, Director
Dr. Arlene Torres is the Director of the Latino Faculty Recruitment Initiative at CUNY. Torres received her PhD and master’s degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is a cultural anthropologist with expertise in Caribbean, Latina/Latino, and Latin American Studies, and a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Africana and Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College.

Dr. Torres has conducted research in the Anglophone and Hispanic Caribbean and in the United States. Her scholarly interests include: African Diaspora; Puerto Rican and Latina/Latino Diaspora; Theories of Race, Ethnicity, Gender and Nationalism; Ideology and Praxis; Migration and Transnationalism; Representation; and Class and Economic Development.

Prior to her arrival at CUNY, Dr. Torres served as Director of the Latina/Latino Studies Program at Illinois and as Associate Professor of Anthropology there. She also served as Assistant to the Dean at the Graduate College at Illinois, and as President of the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists, a section of the American Anthropological Association. In her varied roles, Dr. Torres has worked on the recruitment and retention of university faculty, graduate students, and administrators. She has held appointments and received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, and Princeton University.

Her publications include two edited volumes with Norman E. Whitten, Jr., Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean(Indiana University Press). Her chapter, “Collecting Puerto Ricans,” in Kevin Yelvington’s (ed.) Afro-Atlantic Dialogues: Anthropology in the Diaspora (SAR Press), reflects one of Dr. Torres’s recent intellectual concerns: the racialization of ethnic groups in museum settings. As a public intellectual, she has served as a member of the Advisory Board and consultant to a national project on race supported by the American Anthropological Association, National Science Foundation and Ford Foundation. Ethnographic research related to this project is ongoing. Dr. Torres is currently completing a manuscript focusing on race and racializing practices in Puerto Rico and the Black Diaspora.

Dr. Arlene Torres can be reached via email at Arlene.Torres@hunter.cuny.edu. Her postal address is: Dr. Arlene Torres, Hunter College of The City University of New York, East Building Room 1406, 695 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10065. Her office telephone number is 212-772-5715, and her fax number is 212-650-3673.


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