The Presidential Fellows work with the president and Vice President for Institutional Diversity & Equity, creating research to address diversity and inclusion issues. The Presidential Fellows will focus on a variety of areas, with an overall commitment to the intellectual grounding of actions in research and program innovation.
Welcome to our 2022-2023 Presidential Fellows:
Amor Kohli, an associate professor and chair of the Department of African and Black Diaspora Studies received his PhD at Tufts University and taught at Tufts, Middlebury College, and the University of Vermont before coming to DePaul in 2003.
His research and teaching interests include Literatures of the Black Diaspora, Black musical expression, the intersection between Black music and other areas of expression (literature, performance, visual art, politics).
Kohli's publications include scholarly essays on Black writers published in the journals Callaloo, MELUS, African Identities, and Journal of Commonwealth Literature. His work has also appeared in edited collections, including Beat Drama: Playwrights and Performances of the “Howl" Generation; The Black Imagination, Science Fiction, and the Speculative; Reconstructing the Beats; and the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Jazz and American Culture. His most recent publication is as editor of the book A Beat Beyond: Selected Prose of Major Jackson (Michigan, 2022).
During his fellowship year, Dr. Kohli will develop the foundation of a university-wide mentoring program for faculty from underrepresented groups. The goal of this program, he says, is to support the retention of underrepresented faculty.
Jacqueline Lazú, is an associate professor specializing in Latino and Caribbean literature and culture in the Department of Modern Languages. She is an affiliated faculty member in Latin American and Latino Studies, African and Black Diaspora Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, and Criminology, a department that she co-founded in 2017. For the past five years, she has also served as Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Studies in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences.
Dr. Lazu’s research and publications reflect her preparation as a literary and cultural critic and a commitment to activist scholarship. These include studies of literature and culture as tools for social transformation, the history of Latinx and Latin American social movements, aesthetics, and political philosophy. From 2008-2015, Dr. Lazú served as Program Director of the Community Service Studies Program at DePaul. During this time, she worked with faculty in the program and colleagues at the Steans Center for Community-based Service Learning to bring the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program to DePaul, helped develop a curriculum in partnership with the Stateville Correctional Center, and more recently, the Cook County Department of Corrections in Chicago.
For nearly 20 years, Dr. Lazú has worked collaboratively with the Young Lords, a former gang-turned-political movement, to build the premier archive of the movement in collaboration with DePaul's Richardson Library and DePaul's Center for Latino Research. She has written widely about Black and Latinx Social movements in the city of Chicago, including her current book project titled Stone Revolutionaries: The Chicago Young Lords and the Origins of a Movement.
During her fellowship year, Dr. Lazú will work on a reparative history project and timeline that documents the role DePaul students, faculty, and staff played in Chicago civil rights history. Her work will also connect the Lincoln Park campus with the history of the surrounding community, which was in the 1950s a primary place of settlement for Puerto Ricans moving to Chicago.
To learn more about Dr. Kohli and Dr. Lazú, please read the Newsline article announcing their selection as the 2022-2023 Presidential Fellows.