AAUP Welcomes Rachel Buff as Editor of Journal of Academic Freedom

The AAUP is pleased to announce the appointment of Rachel Ida Buff as the new faculty editor of the online AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom. Buff, who will begin her term as editor with the ninth volume of JAF, is a professor of history, director of the Cultures and Communities Program, and coordinator of the Comparative Ethnic Studies Program at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Her research interests include immigrant rights and itinerant/vagrant histories.  

Buff is author of Immigration and the Political Economy of Home: West Indian Brooklyn and American Indian Minneapolis, 1945–1992 and the forthcoming Against the Deportation Terror: Organizing for Immigrant Rights in the Twentieth Century. She edited the volume Immigrant Rights in the Shadow of Citizenship. She has also published widely in academic and popular journals and blogs. In addition, she is completing a novel, Into Velvet. Her editorial experience includes serving as a reviewer, editor, or editorial board member for journals, university presses, book series, and a workers’ center newspaper. She is a contributing writer for the blog Jewschool. 

Buff has been president of the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee AAUP chapter and was active in its formation as well as in the formation of a Wisconsin state AAUP conference to respond to attacks by Governor Scott Walker and the state legislature on public education. She is a member of the AAUP’s Committee on College and University Governance, and she served as a member of the AAUP’s investigating committee for the Academic Freedom and Tenure investigative report on Spalding University (Kentucky). Commenting on her involvement with the AAUP, she quotes the Milwaukee rapper Milo, who describes being "tenured in this deplorable reality." Buff considers editing the Journal of Academic Freedom to be a form of literary organizing.

JAF was established in 2010, filling the need for a single scholarly journal focusing on issues of academic freedom. Henry Reichman, AAUP first vice-president and chair of the AAUP's Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, said, “In today's political climate challenges to academic freedom are intimately linked to neo-nationalist assaults on diversity and multiculturalism. As a scholar of immigration and ethnicity and an AAUP activist, Rachel Buff is well positioned to lead the Journal in creatively addressing these challenges. The AAUP is fortunate to have her in this position."

The Journal of Academic Freedom is available online at https://www.aaup.org/jaf. The eighth volume, edited by Jennifer H. Ruth, is forthcoming in September 2017.

Photo by Joe Austin