Nancy Ares, PhD, has been a faculty member in higher education since 1999. Beginning at the University of Utah (1999-2003) and now at the University of Rochester (2003-present), she has spent her career researching, teaching, and performing service centered on issues of race, power, culture, and equity. Ares’ service has always been around diversity, equity, and inclusion, from creating and chairing a school-wide DEI committee, serving as a university-level faculty diversity officer, working on a faculty senate task force of discrimination and harassment policy, and being a member of a presidential task force on race and diversity. The last two years have found her moving into faculty professional development around anti-racist curriculum. To date, she has worked with four universities and an NSF-funded grant team, engaging 65 faculty and instructors in anti-racist practice in higher education. 

Ares teaches courses in qualitative and creative research methodologies, and social foundations of education. She conducts research using critical geography, sociocultural, and social network theories as frameworks for investigating classroom and community practices. This research focuses on social and spatial practices that shape participation, how structures and activity are mutually constituted, and how power and roles are negotiated through social interaction. Her work in formal and informal settings emphasizes resource-rich approaches to understanding school and community transformation.

Her work has been published in the American Educational Research Journal, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Teachers College Record, Cognition & Instruction, the Journal of Curriculum Studies, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, International Journal of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning, Journal of Literacy Research, and Mathematical Thinking and Learning.

She is the author and editor (with Edward Buendía and Robert Helfenbein) of the book, Deterritorializing/Reterritorializing: Critical Geography of Educational Reform (Sense, 2017). She and 14 doctoral students authored the book Youth-full Productions: Cultural Practices and Constructions of Content and Social Spaces (Lang, 2009). She is also co-author, with Edward Buendía, of the book Geographies of Difference: The Social Production of the East Side, West Side, and Central City School (Lang, 2006).