Biography
Nelson Flores is a professor of educational linguistics at Penn GSE and affiliated faculty with the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies. He serves as director of the Ph.D. program in Educational Linguistics, faculty advisor for the Working Papers in Educational Linguistics, and chair of the Penn Faculty Senate Committee on Faculty and the Academic Mission. Through these roles, he contributes to shaping institutional priorities around academic governance, mentoring, and equity in higher education.
Dr. Flores’s research examines the historical construction of race and language in the U.S. and how these constructions continue to shape contemporary language education policy and practice. His scholarship has been central to developing what has become known as a raciolinguistic perspective that interrogates how ideas about language are inseparable from histories of racialization. Drawing on historical and policy analysis, his work reveals how these intertwined constructs organize the categories, standards, and expectations that shape the education of racialized students.
These questions emerged from Dr. Flores’s experience as an English as a second language (ESL) teacher working with students officially classified as “long-term English learners.” The disconnect between these students’ linguistic abilities and the deficit-based ways they were represented in policy motivated his inquiry into how language ideologies and colonial histories are reproduced through schooling structures.
He has led and collaborated on numerous projects that bridge historical, policy, and community-based perspectives, including the CUNY–New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals, the Philadelphia Bilingual Education Project, The Center on Standards, Alignment, Instruction, and Learning (C-SAIL), and most recently Navegando Juntes: Creating Innovative Models for Community-Engaged Research and More Equitable Postsecondary Readiness.
Dr. Flores’s contributions have been recognized with multiple national honors, including the 2022 AERA Early Career Award, the 2020 CUNY Graduate Center Graduate of the Last Decade Award, the 2019 James Alatis Prize, the 2017 AERA Bilingual Education SIG Early Career Award, and a 2017 Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Research Interests and Current Projects
Dr. Flores’s research examines how colonial logics linking language, race, and the human continue to shape both educational policy and academic research. He investigates how these enduring frameworks construct racialized communities as linguistically and developmentally deficient, and how such ideas are reproduced—and at times contested—across different levels of educational practice.
His recent book, Becoming the System: A Raciolinguistic Genealogy of Bilingual Education in the Post–Civil Rights Era, provides the foundation for his ongoing work. The book uncovers the raciolinguistic ideologies that structured the Bilingual Education Act and the subsequent institutionalization of bilingual education, revealing the psychologically damaged racialized subject that lay at the heart of these reforms. By showing how bilingual education was imagined as a mechanism for repairing this presumed damage, Becoming the System demonstrates how post–civil rights educational policy reconfigured colonial hierarchies under the guise of inclusion.
Building on these insights, Dr. Flores’s current projects extend this genealogy in three interconnected directions. At the ideological level, he is exploring how colonial constructions of the human underpin dominant notions of human development. This work brings race and language into conversation with disability, gender, and sexuality to examine how these intersecting categories define the “normal” learner and the “deficient” other. At the policy level, he is analyzing the abrupt shift in federal funding priorities under the current presidential administration and the ways these changes amplify racialized discourses while destabilizing long-standing supports for marginalized communities. At the community level, he is developing a community-based, intergenerational participatory model of action research that not only challenges deficit-based narratives but also collaborates with communities to build alternative ways of being, knowing, and learning.
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Journal Editorial Boards
Annual Review of Applied Linguistics
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Bilingual Review/Revista Bilingüe
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Critical Multilingualism Studies
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Educational Researcher
Associate Editor
Journal of Education, Language, and Ideology
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International Journal of the Sociology of Language
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Language Policy
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Language in Society
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Linguistics and Education
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Multilingua
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Reading Research Quarterly
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