Vilna Bashi Treitler is Professor of Black Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara, a sociologist, and a visual artist. Her scholarship theorizes about international migration, race and ethnicity and the dynamics of hierarchical socioeconomic structures both domestically and internationally. She has published several articles and books, including The Ethnic Project: Transforming Racial Fictions into Ethnic Factions (Stanford, 2013), a comparative historical analysis of US ethnic groups’ racialization named to the Zora Canon, the top 100 books ever written by an African American woman. She is the 2020 recipient of the American Sociological Association’s Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award for scholarship in service to social justice. Bashi Treitler is currently at work on a memoir entitled Schooled, about her experiences with public school and higher education, and a related self-portrait series.