Associate Professor, American Studies
Associate Professor, History
Associate Professor, Latino Studies Program
Director, Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society
Black and Latinx studies; social movements, constructions of race and ethnicity, trauma and healing, mental health, abolition
Sonia Lee is an Associate Professor of American Studies and Latinx Studies at Indiana University. Her first book, Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City (University of North Carolina Press, 2014) traces the strategies used by Puerto Ricans and African Americans to conceptualize their racial and ethnic identities, and to build a common civil rights agenda in New York City from the 1950s through the 1970s. Her current book project, To be Available to the Universe: Trauma, Healing and Practices of the Erotic, is an exploration of the sacred interior that has been cultivated by activists, theologians, writers, drug users, and ordinary people of color from the 1960s to the present.
Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
“‘I Was the One Percenter:’ Manny Diaz and the Beginnings of a Black-Puerto Rican Coalition,” co-authored with Ande Diaz, Journal of American Ethnic History, 26: 3 (Spring 2007).
The College of Arts