Karen Ramirez

Dr. Karen Ramirez (she/her/hers) is the Director of the CU Dialogues Program. She is also a faculty member at CU-Boulder, serving as the Assistant Director for Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences for the Miramontes Arts and Sciences Program, which serves underrepresented students in the College of Arts and Sciences. She received a 2018 Boulder Faculty Assembly Award for Leadership and Service. In 2017 she received the Student Involvement Center's "Stumpie" Award for reflecting the values of the Colorado Creed. She also has received the Dorothy Martin Faculty Award for excellence in teaching and activism concerning women’s issues as well as a Marinus G. Smith award for her impact on CU undergraduate students. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in English and has completed dialogue training through Essential Partners, the Kettering Foundation, and the National Intergroup Dialogue Institute. Her literary publications consider how narrative mappings of place in 19th/20th C. western American literature dialogically intersect with contemporary public memory of western places. She has drawn on her foundation in dialogism and narrative study to develop, theorize and study dialogue experiences as a form of engaged learning about cross-cultural perspectives. From 2015-2017, she was the Co-PI on a large Spencer Foundation Civics Measures research grant to develop instruments for measuring engagement across difference in educational dialogic and deliberative settings. Outside of work, she enjoys singing with Boulder's semi-professional choir, Ars Nova Singers, growing and arranging flowers, and hiking/camping.