Jacqueline Lazú is an Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and 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 2019. From 2018-2023, she served as Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Studies in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. Dr. Lazú’s scholarship reflects her preparation as a literary and cultural critic and a commitment to activist and community-based research. 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. She is recognized as a leading historian of the Young Lords, a Chicago Puerto Rican gang turned social movement and has helped establish DePaul's Young Lords special collections archive as a destination for the study of Puerto Rican Chicago, the Rainbow Coalition, Illinois Black Panther Party, and 1960s and 1970s social justice movements. In 2020, Dr. Lazú worked with Participant Media and Maestra, MAAFA Redemption Project on an educational guide that accompanies the film Judas and the Black Messiah, widely used by AP-level classes, colleges and universities, and community organizations throughout the country. In 2021, she was called to serve as an expert witness along with film director Shaka King, Chairman Fred Hampton Jr., and Fredrika Newton at the first-ever briefing hosted by the Congressional TriCaucus for Members of Congress about the Black Panther Party as essential agents of change in the US civil rights movement. In 2022-2023, Dr. Lazú was awarded a Presidential Diversity Fellowship to study the relationship between DePaul, the Young Lords, and the Puerto Rican community of Lincoln Park in the 1950s and 1960s that was displaced by the effects of urban renewal. Among the outcomes of her fellowship was the formation of a committee working to honor the legacy of the movement with a historical marker on campus.