Category: Advisory Board
María DeGuzmán
María DeGuzmán is the Eugene H. Falk Professor of English & Comparative Literature and Founding Director of the UNC Latina/o Studies Program of the Department of English and Comparative Literature. She is the author of three books: Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire (University of Minnesota Press, August 2005), Buenas Noches, American Culture: Latina/o Aesthetics of Night (Indiana University Press, June 2012), and Understanding John Rechy (Univers … Read more
Abelardo de la Cruz
Abelardo de la Cruz is macehualli, a Nahuatl native speaker, and an ixtlamatquetl, a Nahua scholar from Chicontepec, in the Huasteca Veracruzana, Mexico. He is an Assistant Professor of Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His teachings focuses on the Mesoamerican religions and contemporary Indigenous religions of the Americas, with a special emphasis on Nahuatl language, Indigenous devotions, ritual practices and ethnography in Indigenous communiti … Read more
Adam Versényi
Adam Versényi is Professor of Dramaturgy in the Department of Dramatic Art and Senior Dramaturg for PlayMakers Repertory Company. He Chaired the Department from 2014-2022. A theatre scholar, dramaturg, critic, translator, and director, he is the author of Theatre in Latin America: Religion, Politics, and Culture From Cortés to the 1980s (Cambridge University Press), The Theatre of Sabina Berman: The Agony of Ecstasy and Other Plays (Southern Illinois University Press), Ramón Griffero: Your Desi … Read more
Angela Stuesse
Angela Stuesse is broadly interested in social inequality, and her research and teaching interests include globalization, migration, race, labor, human rights, and methodologies of activist research. Her book Scratching Out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South (University of California Press 2016), explores how new Latino migration into Mississippi’s poultry industry has impacted communities and prospects for worker organizing. It is based on six years of activist research engage … Read more
Ariana E. Vigil
Dr. Vigil is a professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. My teaching and research focus on U.S. Latinx literature and culture. In particular, I examine how gender, race, sexuality, and class are deployed in various national and transnational contexts. My first book, War Echoes: Gender and Militarization in U.S. Latina/o Cultural Production (Rutgers University Press, 2014) analyzes how U.S. Latinx authors and activists responded t … Read more
Elyse Crystall
Dr. Crystall teaches “Literature and Cultural Diversity: Transmigrations” which takes as its point of departure Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of the “contact zone,” the site where those who come into contact are changed by the encounter. The texts consist of narratives that move across time and history; space and geography; gender, race, class, sexuality, and nationality and challenge notions of what is defined (culturally) as normal, natural, accepted, and customary – that is, the standard agains … Read more
Gabriela Valdivia
Gabriela Valdivia is a professor in the Department of Geography at UNC-Chapel Hill and Assistant Dean at Honors Carolina. Gabriela is a feminist political ecologist examining the relationship between resources and socio-environmental inequities. Her research and teaching focus on how environmental injustices shape everyday life experiences and decisions in the Americas. She is an author of the digital project Crude Entanglements, which explores the affective dimensions of oil production; a co … Read more
Juan Álamo
Juan Álamo is an Associate Professor at the UNC-Chapel Hill Department of Music and a William Wilson Brown, Jr. Distinguished Term Associate Professor in Latin American Studies. He holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the Puerto Rico Conservatory of Music and a Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees with Jazz as a related field from the University of North Texas. Originally from Cidra, Puerto Rico, Dr. Álamo has presented master classes and/or recitals at the Percussive Arts Society … Read more
Juan Carlos González Espitia
Dr. González Espitia is a scholar of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American and Latina/o literature. His research focuses on non-canonical, heterodox, shunned and hidden literature, ideas, and authors that, although excluded, reveal very profound trends in culture and society. Dr. González Espitia’s research treats representations of disease, literature that challenges the status quo, and nation-building—in particular the complex, dynamic transformation from a colonial condition to one … Read more
Krista Perreira
Dr. Perreira is a health economist who studies disparities in health, education, and economic well-being and inter-relationships between family, health and social policy. Focusing on children in immigrant families, her most recent work combines qualitative and quantitative methodologies to study migration from Latin America and the health and educational consequences of migration. Through her research, she aims to develop programs and policies to improve the well-being of immigrant families and … Read more
Laura Halperin
Dr. Halperin is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Program in Latina/o Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, and she is affiliated with the Department of American Studies and the Curriculum in Global Studies. She is also the Academic Director of N.C. Sli (the Scholars’ Latinx Initiative), a mentorship and leadership program that pairs UNC undergraduates with Latinx high school students and that is built on principles of recognition, affirmation, and equi … Read more
Martín Wannam
Martín Wannam (b. 1992) is a Guatemalan visual artist and educator whose work offers a critical exploration of his homeland’s historical, social, and political landscape. With an equatorial perspective that intersects brownness and wildness, Wannam’s iconoclastic and maximalist approach challenges mainstream narratives through photography, sculpture, and performance art. His multidisciplinary practice examines the impacts of immigration, systemic structures, utopian ideals, and family on both in … Read more
Maya Berry
A third-generation Cuban American, Maya J. Berry is a dancer, performance scholar, and social anthropologist. She brings a Black feminist approach to her research on race, gender, and the Black political imagination in Havana, Cuba. Her first book, tentatively titled “Forming Rumba: Havana’s Black Corporeal Undercommons,” is an ethnography which analyzes Black popular dance as a window into the everyday struggles experienced by rumberos as they navigate the changing socioeconomic landscape of po … Read more
Oswaldo Estrada
Dr. Estrada’s research focuses on gender formation and transgression, historical memory, and the construction of dissident identities in contemporary Latina/o American Literature. He regularly teaches a first-year seminar on Mexican and Latina women, titled “Mexican Women across Borders and Genres,” and also an upper division course, titled “Violence in Contemporary Latina/o American Literature.” He has published articles on Peruvian American author Daniel Alarcón, and also on Mexican writers Da … Read more
Rosa Perelmuter
Dr. Perelmuter created and taught regularly for many years a first-year honors seminar about Latin@ literature and culture (ROML 055H, “Writing with an accent: Latino Literature and Culture”), which is now being taught by other colleagues in Romance Studies. In this course, one of the first about Latin@ literature to be offered at UNC, students are exposed to the many faces/ethnicities of Hispanics living in the United States and their literary and cultural production. She now regularly teaches … Read more
Roxana Pérez-Méndez
Roxana Pérez-Méndez is a video performance and installation artist who creates work about the arbitrary nature of contemporary identity through the lens of her own experience as a Puerto Rican woman.
Stephanie Elizondo Griest
A Chicana from South Texas, Stephanie Elizondo Griest is the author of three travel memoirs that explore Latina/o cultural identity: Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana; Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines; and All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands. She has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Oxford American, VQR, and The Believer, and her reporting has won a Richard Margolis Award for Social Justice. Here at UNC-Chapel … Read more
Tanya Shields
Dr. Shields’ research and teaching on the Caribbean may be of particular interest to students pursuing a certificate in Latina/o Studies. In addition to her research (see Bodies and Bones: Feminist Rehearsal and Imagining Caribbean Belonging and The Legacy of Eric Williams: Into the Postcolonial Moment), she teaches two relevant courses that include readings and material from cultural producers in the Caribbean and Latina/o artists in the US: WMST 350: Spitting in the Wind: American Women, Art, … Read more
Ylce Irizarry
My research areas include all things Latinx, including Chicanx and Latinx and cultural production, Hispanic transnational literatures, Caribbean historical fiction, Visual Rhetorics, and Testimonio. Generally, I am interested in what and why: what representations of Latin@ experience look like and why authors have made the specific generic, linguistic, and visual choices that ultimately appear in their work. My most significant publication is my book, Chicana/o and Latina/o Fiction: The New Memo … Read more