The Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, & Colonialism grew out of the Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship (RIC). RIC was founded in 2006 by political science faculty members Michael Hanchard and Erin Aeran Chung to provide a forum for graduate students to explore how racial hierarchies interact with migration flows to shape understandings of citizenship, debates on national identity, and practices of democratic inclusion and social exclusion.

Growth of the program

RIC emerged at a critical period in both academic and world history, when the reconfiguration of the international political economy, migration flows, and political conflicts defied national and even regional solutions. In places as distinct as Japan, India, Britain, France, the United States, Brazil, and South Africa, governmental officials struggled to classify and incorporate new populations into existing, often outdated, structures. RIC emphasized cross-regional comparisons, especially among societies and polities that are often overlooked in existing scholarship on race and ethnicity.

RIC grew to bridge the humanities and social sciences to provide opportunities for students and faculty to convene. The program sponsored annual international graduate conferences and localized programming, such as the annual Living Hopkins roundtable, which focused on pressing concerns in Baltimore and on campus.

RIC-affiliated faculty also offered extra graduate student training, such as pre-dissertation, dissertation, and job market workshops. RIC was also one of the pillars of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded project Inheritance Baltimore: Humanities and Arts Education for Black Liberation.

RIC has been responsible for a wide range of unique and interdisciplinary—or even postdisciplinary, as we like to say—programming on campus and beyond. Programming themes have included Black-Asian Solidarities, Abolition Without Borders, and Freedom Education.

Looking Forward

The Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism replaces “Citizenship” with “Colonialism” in the original name of the Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship. This change represents an important expansion of the program’s intellectual emphasis. It pushes the center beyond our earlier reliance on the administrative and comparative vocabulary of the nation-state. At the same time, the term allows RIC’s previous comparative questions on migration and peoplehood to be maintained. Most critically, emphasizing colonialism investigates the transnational and imperial forces arrayed against those communities and political identities either uninterested or prohibited from particular processes of national belonging, including Indigenous polities across the globe.

With the launch of the Chloe Center in 2024, Stuart Schrader became the new director, supported intellectually and practically by graduate fellow Sheharyar Imran and undergraduate fellow Natalie Wang. The center expanded its faculty advisory board, with members now from Anthropology, Classics, English, History, Political Science, and Sociology. In fall 2024, graduate fellows Ronay Bakan and April Ma joined the center.