About

Sunnie Rucker-Chang is an academic specializing in the social construction of race and culture, with a focus on privileged and marginalized communities in Central and Southeast Europe. Her research explores how literature and film contribute to culture and nationalist identities, particularly in the creation and maintenance of racialized communities in Southeast Europe. Her interests also include émigré and exile literature and the application of post-colonial thought to post-socialist contexts. She holds a PhD from The Ohio State University and has conducted research funded by the American Association of University Women, Taft Research Center, and University Research Council. Rucker-Chang is involved in initiatives addressing systemic racism and discrimination, serving as Co-director and Co-PI of the Howard University Undergraduate Think Tank, which supports students and scholars from underrepresented and underserved populations in the field of REEES. Additionally, she is Co-director of the University of Cincinnati’s STARTALK Russian language programs. Her work contributes to understanding the intersections of race, culture, and nationalism in European contexts.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Gender studies
• Law
• History
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• Critical Introduction

  Academic Studies Press eBooks · 2026-03-05

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  On Historical and Social ContextsFrom the 1870s until the 1940s, the study of Russian and other Slavic languages in the United States was sparse, though emergent, located at fewer than two dozen postsecondary institutions, most of which practiced de facto and/or de jure exclusion on the basis of race, sex, and/or class.Given its most meaningful ascendancy took place during World War II owing to wartime urgency, the field was largely funded and created by white, affluent men.Many of these men belonged to elite social circles in academia, government, and philanthropy.By design, the formation of Area Studies fields, including Russian Area Studies, supported US imperial expansion in order to reify American soft power across the world.As such, migrant faculty and students were often viewed with suspicion.Eventually, under McCarthyism, some of the academics working in tandem with the government on the Soviet Union found themselves viewed similarly suspiciously.Decades passed before women and racialized minorities were afforded equal access to higher education, including access to the study of Russia and East Europe.After the launch of Sputnik, the government for the first time provided grants instead of loans to post-secondary institutions to build expertise in world languages and cultures.In subsequent years, though the Cold War supplied tensions worthy of continued federal support for Area Studies and languages, funding waxed and waned due to the economic challenges of the 1970s in the US and the USSR and the space and arms races.The collapse of the USSR starting in 1989 reoriented US national security priorities away from containment efforts.After September 11, 2001, national security education pivoted to the Arab-Islamic world, Afghanistan, and the Middle East, owing to revised, often Islamophobic reactivity of the US government.Since then, government support and philanthropic engagement supporting study of East Europe and Eurasia has xvi S u n n i e R u c k e r -C h a n g a n d R a c h e l S t a u f f e r been in a state of transition.While funding sources and dollar amounts waxed and waned, its existence, in some form, was, more or less, guaranteed since post-Sputnik educational reforms like the National Defense Education Act (1958), Civil Rights Act (1964), and Higher Education Act (1965).At the time of publication of this volume, however, funds appropriated under Title VI and Title VIII of the Higher Education Act for the study of Russia, East Europe and Eurasia have been cut altogether for the first time since their initiation in the post-Sputnik era.As we finalize the volume at the outset of the second Trump administration, the field is facing many unknowns.For the first time since wartime urgency compelled the ascendance of the field nearly a century ago, the United States has deprioritized participation in the world order established after World War II.Artificial Intelligence (AI), virtual reality, artificial reality, gamification, hybrid warfare, and quantum computing are rapidly influencing language instruction, language learning methods, and perceptions of the profession.We do not know what these phenomena foretell for the study of languages in the United States, especially of East European and Eurasian languages, and in particular, those other than Russian, which still functions hegemonically in these and other regions of the world.We compose this introduction to Inclusive Strategies and Critical Pedagogies amidst great uncertainty, encouraged all the same by each chapter's creative, innovative, and critical approaches to teaching languages of the regions we study, toward greater inclusiveness beyond dominant narratives that have persisted throughout the American field's 125 years of existence.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Blackness beyond the Euro-American Lens as Exhibited and Documented in the 2000s at the Museum of African Art in Belgrade, Serbia

  2025-08-29

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The Museum of African Art (MAU) in Belgrade was established in 1977 to exhibit, explore, and research African culture and art to entrench Yugoslav and African nonaligned relations. However, the desire of state socialist countries to connect politics and cultures to the decolonized world waned in the 1970s when these nations opted to align their politics to Euro-American institutions and capitalist/democratic futures. Nevertheless, MAU continued to feature African art and culture and engage Blackness and Africanity beyond the colonial lens even after the demise of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. This chapter explores how the MAU continued to provide a platform to explore and elevate African art broadly and aspects of Blackness more generally. Specifically, it addresses how the content of three exhibit catalogs challenges European socioracial hierarchies and preferences. Rather than minimizing the aesthetic value of physical features of African diasporic people, the catalogs uplift and celebrate Black skin and hair—two prominent aspects of Blackness long considered irreconcilable with European norms. The MAU and these catalogs illustrate that aspects of Blackness can continue to be celebrated and appreciated well beyond their ability to signal solidarity. More importantly, perhaps, the exhibits, outreach, and collections at the MAU rebuke the normalizing lens of the West and offer alternative ways of viewing, documenting, and engaging Blackness.

  PublisherDOI

• Yugoslav Film in <i>Black</i> and <i>White</i>

  Slavic Review · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The films Valley of Peace (1956), Jagoš i Uglješa (1976), Tit for Tat (1978), and A Great Guy at Heart (1981) represent exceptions among the Yugoslav film canon because they include Black actors among their casts. Given that the majority of Yugoslavs were racialized as “white,” the Black actors in these films emerge as a type of filmic device, providing social commentary on the post-World War II geopolitical priorities of Yugoslavia, including antiracism, international nonalignment, and Third World solidarity. Film was easy to distribute and consume and it became integral to the creation and maintenance of post-WWII Yugoslav culture. Through its content, storylines, and plot, an image of the idealized national Yugoslav body emerged that included Black men. In this article, I analyze the aforementioned films against the backdrop of the goals and traditional frames of Yugoslav cinema to highlight and offer insight into the uses and symbolism of blackness on screen.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Introduction: On Black Life and Blackness in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Societies

  Slavic Review · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Nearly half a century ago, Allison Blakely produced Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought . The landmark text explored Black people’s lives and experiences in the Russian empire and the Soviet Union and how non-Black people in those spaces received them and conceptualized blackness from the seventeenth century to the 1980s. Since its publication, many of the Black characters and historical episodes adorning Russia and the Negro have become the terrains or mainstays of scholarly debates about Black life and experiences and ideas of blackness in Slavic, eastern, southeastern, and central European, as well as Eurasian societies. 1 Roughly two decades later, others took up the mantel.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Jekaterina Dunajeva. <i>Constructing Identities Over Time: “Bad Gypsies” and “Good Roma” in Russia and Hungary</i>. Central European University Press, 2021. xiii, 223 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. Tables. $65.00, hard bound. $00.00, ebook.

  Slavic Review · 2025-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Jekaterina Dunajeva. Constructing Identities Over Time: “Bad Gypsies” and “Good Roma” in Russia and Hungary. Central European University Press, 2021. xiii, 223 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. Tables. 00.00, ebook. - Volume 84 Issue 1

  PublisherDOI

• (Re)Imagining Solidarities, (Re)Imagining Serbia

  Liverpool University Press eBooks · 2022-09-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter discusses the 2010 creation, by the Serbian government, of the “World in Serbia” project, an international student mobility scheme offering scholarships to students from Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) observer and member countries to study at the University of Belgrade. The announcement came only a few years after the 2008 financial crisis, which was a time when anxieties, fears, and tension toward migrant populations were at a high in Europe. In this chapter she explores Serbian (re)engagement with the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), an organization that lost most of its cultural capital with the demise of blocism and the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s and how, in contradistinction to a contemporary European norm, international students normalization process in Serbia.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction:

  Liverpool University Press eBooks · 2022-09-15

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• (Re)imagining Solidarities, (Re)imagining Serbia:

  Liverpool University Press eBooks · 2022-09-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A Moment of Reckoning: Transcending Bias, Engaging Race and Racial Formations in Slavic and East European Studies

  Slavic Review · 2021 · 10 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Gender studies

  Race and racial formations and categories define global systems of power and are not bound by history or culture. Nevertheless, with few noted exceptions, race as a category of analysis has largely been rejected and rendered inapplicable within Slavic, east European, and Eurasian Studies. This unwillingness to expand categories of critical analysis has created a void in our area and field of study, shaping a false sense of racelessness. Without the inclusion of race critical theories into our classrooms and scholarship, our students are left with minimal tools to address difference and social exclusion. In this article, we turn to critical perspectives to highlight some ways that race is being meaningfully incorporated into scholarship about the region. We illustrate why engagement with race and racialization is helpful for analysis, urgent, and necessary. Finally, we also address how our field can better prepare students as they engage these subjects.

  PublisherDOI

• RACIALIZATION AND RACE STUDIES IN RUSSIAN AND EASTERN EUROPEAN SCHOLARSHIP: INTRODUCTION

  The Slavic and East European Journal · 2021-01-01

  articleSenior author

  Alexander Burry, Yana Hashamova, Sunnie Rucker-Chang, RACIALIZATION AND RACE STUDIES IN RUSSIAN AND EASTERN EUROPEAN SCHOLARSHIP, The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 65, No. 4 (WINTER 2021), pp. 576-582

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Felix B. Chang

  Stanford Health Care

  23 shared

• Chelsi West Ohueri

  1 shared

• Yana Hashamova

  1 shared

• Virág Varga

  1 shared

• Oana Popescu-Sandu

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• American Association of University Women
• Taft Research Center
• University Research Council