Associate Professor
E-mail: ruizele1@msu.edu
Elena Ruíz is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University. She is also faculty in Global Studies, American Indian and Indigenous Studies, Chicano/Latino Studies, the Center for Gender in a Global Context, and the Research Consortium on Gender-Based Violence. Prior to joining MSU, Dr. Ruíz was a research fellow at the Graduate Institute (Institut de Hautes études Internationales et du Développement) in Geneva, Switzerland. She has authored over twenty articles and essays on philosophical approaches to structural violence and gender-based violence in journals such as Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy Quarterly (with Kristie Dotson), and written for volumes such as The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Philosophy, The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Race, The Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Social and Political Theory, and The Palgrave Handbook on Critical Race and Gender. Her main interests are in understanding the mechanisms behind structural regeneration of colonial violence and its impact on women’s lives across generations, especially for Indigenous women and women of color in the U.S. and Mexico. She is particularly interested in developing analyses that track intergenerational violence at the policy and institutional levels, focusing on social stratification and inequality in modern-day public health and legal systems. Dr. Ruíz’s work has been funded by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, The National Endowment for the Humanities, and through cross-institutional collaborative grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She is on leave in Fall 2019 at the Department of Sociology at Harvard University.
For more information on Dr. Ruíz’s work, visit https://philpeople.org/profiles/elena-ruiz