Racquel Gates (Assistant Professor) comes to CSI from the Media Studies Department of the New School. She received her Ph.D. in Screen Culture from Northwestern University in 2010, after getting her M.A. from the University of Chicago and her B.S. from Georgetown University. Dr. Gates specializes in African American screen culture. Her dissertation, Acting White: African Americans, Whiteface, and Post-Civil Rights Popular Culture, examines how African-American performances of whiteface in the post-Civil Rights era operate as a means of strategically navigating shifting tropes of blackness across time. In addition to film and media theory, Dr. Gates is also an expert on gender, queer, and critical race theories.
