Hello. My name is John Williams-Searle and I am the director of The Center for Citizenship, Race, and Ethnicity Studies (CREST) at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York. I have started this blog to help CREST reach out to teachers, researchers, community members, and students who are interested in CREST’s mission.
CREST serves as a place for scholarly discourse and research of the vital issues of citizenship, race, and ethnicity at the College of Saint Rose and across the region. Through the sponsorship of two Dissertation Fellows—drawn from a national applicant pool—and five Residential Fellows picked from the Saint Rose faculty, CREST brings together a group of scholars that furthers this burgeoning area of research and teaching that ideally draws on a variety of disciplines. It is, in fact, the intention of CREST to foster a true interdisciplinary approach to these topics. CREST researchers gain insights and methodologies from a variety of disciplines, including history, political science, literature, geography, cultural studies, anthropology, Africana Studies, Latino Studies, Asian Studies, American Studies, women’s studies, critical race studies, urban studies, legal studies, and communication studies—to name a few.
To help bring scholars, students, and community members together, CREST will sponsor a variety of events throughout the academic year. These will include a monthly colloquia series in which Dissertation and Resident Fellows and area scholars will present their research, less formal brown-bag lunch discussions, a lecture series, and, ultimately, an annual national scholarly conference. It is the intention of CREST’s founders that these lectures and discussions will help to facilitate the scholarly production of CREST fellows and members. Publication to more widely disseminate CREST research and to help make CREST a vital center for the study of citizenship, race, and ethnicity is one of the fundamental goals of the institution.
