Wanzer-Serrano, Darrel Associate Professor

Darrel Wanzer-Serrano is Associate Head of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Associate Professor in the Department of Communication. He is also Core Faculty in the Latino/an and Mexican American Studies (LMAS) Program. His research is focused on the intersections of race, ethnicity, and public discourse, particularly as they relate to formations of coloniality and decoloniality in the United States and within Latina/o/x contexts. His newest book, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation (Temple University Press, 2015), is the first scholarly monograph on one of the most significant organizations of the Puerto Rican diaspora. The Young Lords (1969-1976) was a revolutionary nationalist, anti-racist, anti-sexist street political organization who advanced a thirteen-point political program featuring support for the liberation of all Puerto Ricans (on the island and in the U.S.), the broader liberation of all "Third World people," equality for women, US demilitarization, leftist political education, socialist redistribution, community control, and other programs as they fit into their platform and ecumenical ideology. As part of the broader Young Lords project, he edited The Young Lords: A Reader (New York University Press, 2010), which was a well reviewed critical edition of primary source documents produced originally by the organization. His scholarship has also appeared in numerous journals, edited books, and in various public forums. Dr. Wanzer-Serrano is currently working on a new project about institutional rhetorics of "servingness" at emerging Hispanic-Serving Institutions (eHSIs), with a specific focus on how those discourses emerge from contexts of racialized organizations. Most recently, he edited a forum in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, for which he penned the introduction that argues rhetorical studies is fundamentally racist and needs some substantive antiracist attention. "Rhetoric's Rac(e/ist) Problems" is among the top 5 most shared rhetoric journal articles of all time (according to Altmetric data) and is among the top 5 most viewed/downloaded articles in the history of the journal. Dr. Wanzer-Serrano teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in rhetoric, critical race studies, Latinx studies, social movement, and more.