Draft:Dylan Rodriguez

• Comment: "maintained a day job" is not appropriate for an encyclopedic entry. Article needs rewriting. Ktkvtsh (talk) 00:03, 30 August 2024 (UTC)

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Dylan Rodríguez is an activist, writer, award-winning scholar, and teacher who holds the title of Distinguished Professor at the University of California-Riverside, where he has worked since 2001. He is a faculty member in the Department of Black Study as well as the Department of Media and Cultural Studies. Rodríguez served as Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies from 2009-2016 and Chair of the UCR Academic Senate from 2016-2020. Since 2021, he has worked as the Co-Director of UC Riverside's Center for Ideas and Society. His pedagogical, theoretical and analytical work has contributed to various United States-based and global radical, leftist, and liberationist movements and organizations since the late-1990s, including prison/police/carceral abolition, U.S. political prisoner support, community autonomy and mutual aid, Black liberationist and Palestine solidarity, and anti-colonialist/anti-imperialist projects. He is widely known as a public-facing radical intellectual. In addition to frequent campus, online, and public lectures and facilitated dialogs, he often contributes to progressive and leftist independent media outlets, including The Intercept, The Real News Network, Black Liberation Media, Black Agenda Report and Millennials Are Killing Capitalism Podcast. Rodríguez's writing has appeared in a wide variety of venues, including Harvard Law Review, Truthout, Critical Ethnic Studies, Yes!, Social Text, Public Books, The Black Scholar and Monthly Review.

Rodríguez was elected President of the American Studies Association by his peers in 2020 and was named to the inaugural class of Freedom Scholars, a prestigious nomination-only national award program that recognizes " the role that Freedom Scholars play in cultivating and nurturing movements for justice and freedom." During the early part of his career, Rodríguez was named an "Emerging Scholar" in 2006 by Diverse magazine. He has written three single-authored books, including the award-winning work White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide, which won the international 2022 Frantz Fanon Prize. Rodríguez also co-edited the field-shaping text Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader, which has earned scholarly praise for curating a new stage in the development of Ethnic Studies and related fields of study.

As the UC Riverside Senate Chair, Rodríguez led the UCR campus faculty through a major administrative leadership crisis in 2016-2017, culminating in the resignation of campus Provost/Executive Vice Chancellor Paul D'Anieri. He has made repeated public criticisms of the University of California administration for failing to take the problems of antiblack and racist police violence seriously, instead offering superficial institutional reforms and powerless "task forces" as pacifying public relations measures. As a University of California faculty member, he is part of a yearslong effort to implement an Ethnic Studies curriculum in the California public school system and has criticized outside efforts by Zionist organizations and lobbyists to dilute its content by eliminating references to Palestine and struggles for Palestinian freedom. As a result of these and other public positions, Rodríguez is a periodic target of right-wing criticism, doxxing, harassment, and death threats.

Rodríguez was a co-founder or founding member of several national organizations, including the prison abolitionist organization Critical Resistance, Abolition Collective, Critical Ethnic Studies Association, Cops Off Campus, Scholars for Social Justice, and the UC Riverside Department of Black Study, among others.

Education

Rodríguez earned two Bachelor's degrees as an undergraduate (1991-1995) at Cornell University in Africana Studies and the College Scholar Program. He was also the first student to earn the Concentration degree in Asian American Studies. He worked closely with Professors James Turner, Gary Okihiro, and Sunn Shelly Wong. Immediately upon completion of his studies at Cornell, he entered the Ph.D. program in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley (1995-2001), where he studied under Professors Angela Y. Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Michael Omi, Stephen Small, Raka Ray, Robert Allen, and others.