Center Director
Laura E. Enriquez is Associate Professor of Chicano/Latino Studies. She is also Faculty-in-Residence at the UCI DREAM Center. Her research and teaching aims to identify and disrupt social inequalities while also empowering members of historically excluded groups. She is the author of the award-winning book, Of Love and Papers: How Immigration Policy Affects Romance and Family (University of California Press, 2020), in which she explores how immigration policies constrain the dating, marriage, and parenting experiences of undocumented young adults and limit intergenerational mobility within mixed-status families. She is Principal Investigator on the Undocumented Student Equity Project and the UC Collaborative to Promote Immigrant and Student Equity; both are collaborative research initiatives that examine how immigration policies disrupt the educational experiences and wellbeing of undocumented college students and students from mixed-status families. She is passionate about conducting research and working with community members and stakeholders to translate research into policies and practices that promote equity and justice.
Associate Director
Jessica Millward is the Associate Director for the Center for Liberation, Anti-Racism and Belonging. One of five campus wide inaugural Inclusive Excellence Term Chairs in Black Thriving, Associate Professor in the Department of History, and Core Faculty member of African American Studies, Millward is particularly interested in the intersections of slavery, freedom, power and liberation. Dr. Millward's first book, Finding Charity’s Folk: Enslaved and Free Black women in Maryland was published as part of the Race in the Atlantic World series, Athens: University of Georgia Press (2015). An award-winning scholar, she has published in the Journal of African American History, the Journal of Women’s History, Frontiers, Palimpsest, Nommo, Souls, and the Women’s History Review, as well as Op-eds in Chronicle of Higher Education, The Feministwire.com and The Conversation.com.
Dr. Millward is currently working on two solo authored book length projects. The first discusses African American women's experiences with sexual assault and intimate partner violence from Reconstruction to the Jazz Age. The second books look at historical memory, Ghana, and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. A radical dreamer media savvy historian Millward co-hosted the Historians on Housewives podcast.