Alumna Kristian Contreras, who graduated Syracuse University School of Education with a doctorate in 2023, has been named National Women’s Studies Association Interim Director.
The founder and lead consultant at Beyond Marginality LLC—which supports feminist-led organizational project management, storytelling projects, and social justice education initiatives—Contreras is described as a “Black feminist dreamer and educator.”
As a first-generation Afro-Dominican-Guyanese daughter of Caribbean immigrants, Contreras’ research merges social justice education, Black feminism, and Critical Race Theory’s power of storytelling to “transform her curious daydreams into liberatory realities.”
Contreras’ doctoral research centered on racism, misogynoir, and plantation politics on Black women’s embodied experiences in the academy. Her dissertation—”#NotYourMammy: Explicating the Experience of Black Women Graduate Students as Learners and Laborers in American Academia”—explores the ways Black women are expected to embody the colonial Mammy trope while learning in and laboring in American higher education.