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 … Continued
Adam Versényi
Dr. Versényi teaches courses in Latin American and U.S. Latino/a Theatre and Performance, and helps direct the Teatro Latino/a Series.
Altha Cravey
Altha J. Cravey’s work explores globalization livelihoods, and labor geographies from a feminist perspective using ethnography, political economy and collaborative video documentaries. She has expertise in Mexico, Mexican development policies, NAFTA, and Mexican working class experiences in the United States South. She has published in Feminist Formations, Ethnography, Economic Geography, Social and Cultural Geography, Antipode, and also published a book, Women and Work in Mexico’s Maquiladoras. … Continued
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 … Continued
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 … Continued
China Medel
Dr. Medel’s research and teaching interests include visual media studies, performance, U.S.-Mexico border studies, Chicana/o and Latina/o literature and art, hemispheric and transnational American Studies, social movements, and transnational feminism. Her research focuses on the role of art and media in imagining and generating new modes of political recognition in the Americas. Her dissertation “Border Images and Imaginaries: Spectral Aesthetics and Visual Medias of Americanity at the U.S.-Mexi … Continued
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 … Continued
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 … Continued
Juan Álamo
As an educator and performer I am involved in different recording projects, classes, lectures and master classes related to Latin American culture/studies. For instance, at UNC I teach two courses related to Latin American music: MUSC 147 – Intro to Latin American Music and MUSC 213-007, UNC Global Rhythm Ensemble. Through these our students get an opportunity to courses study the history, culture, music –artists
Juan Carlos González-Espitia
Dr. González-Espitia is a scholar of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American and Latina/o literature. He has continuously taught courses and guided work in both time periods, inspiring and being inspired by my students. 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 … Continued
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 … Continued
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 … Continued
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 … Continued
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 … Continued
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 … Continued
Susan Harbage Page
Harbage Page is a visual artist whose research focuses on social justice issues concerning race, surveillance, and militarized borders. Her work is extremely diverse both in substance, form, and media and can be roughly divided into “The U.S–Mexico Border Project” which includes the “Anti-Archive of Trauma on the U.S.-Mexico Border” with circa 1000 objects (2007-present) and “Textiles: A Metaphorical Tracing” (2012-present). Both bodies of work focus on archives, how they shape our histories, wh … Continued
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, … Continued
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 … Continued