Faculty of Color Collective
Under the auspices of the Faculty Mentoring Program, the Faculty of Color Collective provides a range of resources and opportunities for professional development and community building to the growing number of tenure-track and long-term contract faculty of color at Brandeis across the School of Arts and Sciences, Heller, and IBS.
Ulka Anjaria, Director of Faculty Mentoring for the Arts and Sciences, serves as the Collective's coordinator. She, along with Sarah Mayorga (Associate Professor of Sociology), serve as mentors to the Collective. Working in an advisory capacity, the Collective's mentors are available to share their insights and advice about navigating career trajectories at Brandeis and the academy at large. You can request to meet with a mentor of your choosing by clicking the contact box in their bio.
In addition to providing access to mentors, the Collective fosters peer mentorship through virtual writing and research accountability groups. It also sponsors a communal meal each semester as a means of building community among faculty of color within and across the School of Arts and Sciences, Heller and IBS. The FoC Collective is supported by funds provided by the Office of the Provost and the Office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences.
Faculty of color who are interested in joining the Collective can sign up online. Please feel free to be in touch with Ulka Anjaria if you have any questions.
Faculty Mentor Bios
I am a professor of English and director of the Mandel Center for the Humanities at Brandeis University. I have been at Brandeis since 2007 when I began as an assistant professor straight out of graduate school. I am the author of "Realism in the 20th-Century Indian Novel: Colonial Difference and Literary Form" (Cambridge UP, 2012), "Reading India Now: Contemporary Formations in Literature and Popular Culture" (Temple UP, 2019) and "Understanding Bollywood: The Grammar of Hindi Cinema" (Routledge, 2021), along with articles in academic journals as well as public-facing venues.
I am happy to help faculty navigate the Brandeis institution, especially surrounding book publication, applying for fellowships, practical writing skills, time management and work-life balance.
I am a qualitative sociologist with expertise in race and racism, Latinx migration, and urban sociology. My research investigates questions of racism and power, with a focus on multiracial neighborhoods. I earned a PhD in Sociology from Duke University in 2012 and previously worked at the University of Cincinnati and University of Massachusetts Boston.
As a FoCC mentor, I am especially interested in questions about teaching, mental health and academic parenthood.