Erica Chito Childs is a transdisciplinary scholar, boundary-breaking writer, and transformational leader.
She is a fierce advocate for the democratic promise of public higher education.
Her scholarship, teaching, and leadership are bound together by a single enduring question: what do the borders we draw around love, around family, around knowledge itself reveal about the world we have built, and the one we still might become?
As the Ruth and Harold Newman Dean of Arts and Sciences at Hunter College-CUNY, one of the most diverse and storied public universities in the United States, she brings energy, rigor, and an unshakeable commitment to equity to every dimension of her leadership. Her vision is simple and ambitious: to build an institution as intellectually bold, inclusive, and consequential as the communities it exists to serve.
For over two decades, her research has mapped the intimate terrain where race, gender, sexuality, and identity collide in the families we form, the media we consume, and the educational institutions that shape what we believe is possible.
Books
Her three books, Navigating Interracial Borders, Fade to Black and White, and The Boundaries of Mixedness, have established her as one of the most original and consequential voices in the sociology of race, desire, and belonging. Her forthcoming book is a provocative exploration of the global hierarchies of desire and a culminating work of global scholarship on race, power, and the boundaries that shape who we are allowed to love.