Historian Max Krochmal, the recipient of multiple national and international scholarly awards, is set to guide the University of New Orleans doctoral justice studies program into its next phase. Krochmal arrived in August following a Fulbright Fellowship in Mexico City last spring.
The justice studies program, which was approved by the University of Louisiana System Board of Supervisors in 2020, offers four areas of concentrations in criminal, educational, environmental and social justice. The program will enroll its third class in the fall.
“We are uniquely situated as a university and a program to have an impact across the Gulf South and nation,” Krochmal said. “To create a model for effectively multiplying leadership, for creating more scholar activists who can pair research and advocacy and help to transform the region.”
Prior to 91, Krochmal spent 11 years at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth where he was a history professor and the founding chair of comparative race and ethnic studies. He has earned a reputation as an accomplished professor of history specializing in civil rights.
His scholarly work covers the gamut of justice issues, from examining coalition-building among diverse community organizers across the civil rights era to understanding social movements and relational racial formations, said Mahyar Amouzegar, the former provost and senior vice president for academic affairs who helped to recruit Krochmal to 91.
Amouzegar, who recently joined the faculty in the Department of Economics and Finance, also helped to establish the new doctoral program, along with language and literature professor and former dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Education and Human Development Kim Martin Long.
“I was looking for a leader who understood the history and culture of justice studies and who could bring a deep sense of knowledge and pride with a vast record of scholarly work,” Amouzegar said. “Someone who understands and appreciates our community, but can also build a diverse coalition to shepherd and grow the program. Dr. Krochmal embodied all these characteristics and more.”
Krochmal is adept at combining scholarly passions. He is the award-winning author of “Blue Texas: The Making of a Multiracial Democratic Coalition in the Civil Rights Era” (University of North Carolina Press) and co-editor of “Civil Rights in Black and Brown: Histories of Resistance and Struggle in Texas” (University of Texas Press). He also directed the oral history project undergirding the volume, with support from a National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Grant.
As a Fulbright-García Robles fellow, Krochmal served as the chair of U.S. studies at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City last spring. A frequent collaborator with grassroots social movement organizations as well as government and nonprofit agencies, Krochmal co-chaired the Fort Worth Independent School District Racial Equity Committee from 2017 to 2021 and collaborated with the district and colleagues to co-create “Latinx Studies Curriculum in K-12 Schools: A Practical Guide”(TCU Press).
In November, Krochmal was the recipient of the prestigious Oral History Association Book Award for the collaborative book, “Civil Rights in Black and Brown: Histories of Resistance and Struggle in Texas.”
The book and project examine and record the history of African American and Mexican American civil rights activists in Texas.
“We conducted over 500 life history interviews and built a database of those interviews,” Krochmal said. “We broke the interviews into these clips and each clip has its own metadata so that you can find what you’re looking for. There are 8,000 clips in the database and it’s publicly available.
“It’s being used in a million different ways by people doing planning projects, people doing architecture projects, journalists, teachers. It’s used in classrooms all the time.”
After the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, journalists looking to learn more about the community used the project’s website and interviews to find longtime residents or other sources, Krochmal said. The project and book include a chapter called the 1970 Uvalde School Walkout that examines the town’s historical inequities as described by Mexican American residents.
Krochmal said the doctoral program’s continued collaboration with community groups, such as nonprofits, government agencies, as well as businesses, is key to continued growth and for forging an impact in the realm of social justice.
“I think the vision is to position justice studies to be a catalyst for social transformation, and to do that by combining people’s passions,” Krochmal said. “All of our students are already advocates in some way. We want to pair that passion with rigorous scholarly practice so that we can help those students become more effective in serving their communities and help them with the credentials they need to engage in that type of transformational work.”
With a research background in coalition building, Krochmal hopes to expand the justice studies conversation into a broader field of what he describes as relational ethnic studies that would encompass the newer migrant communities of Latinos and Asian Americans in New Orleans and Louisiana.
“I think we have an opportunity to think about race and ethnicities beyond the Black and White binary … to really benefit from being an institution that welcomes students from these newer migrant communities and being intentional about that.”
The program has 15 students enrolled and is set to hit its first milestone in the fall with as many as eight ABD students working full-time on their dissertations, Krochmal said. ABD students are those who have all PhD requirements completed except the dissertation.
“The first cohort is in their second year. They will propose their dissertation projects, do their comprehensive exams and defend,” he said. “So that’s a big milestone for us.”
The program is currently enrolling for the fall 2023 term. The deadline to apply is Feb. 1.
“This is the place where people can come and gain the skills they need to be effective change agents in their communities, and where they can build collaborations that produce social change,” Krochmal said.
For more information and to view a webinar about the justice studies doctoral program visit /academics/colaehd/justice-studies
