Join us as we continue to celebrate, reflect and uplift the 50th anniversary of Latinx Studies. During the final event of this two-part symposium, our distinguished faculty alongside pioneers and field-shaping scholars discuss Latinx Studies’ far-reaching legacy.
This event is co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS).
Panelists
Tanya K. Hernandez is a professor of law at Fordham University School of Law, where she teaches Comparative Employment Discrimination, Critical Race Theory, and Trusts & Estates. She received her A.B. from Brown University, and her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she served as Note Topics Editor of the Yale Law Journal. She has served as a faculty fellow at the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University, and as a scholar in residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. In 2009, Professor Hernandez was elected to the American Law Institute and in 2007, Hispanic Business Magazine selected her as one of the 100 Most Influential Hispanics. Professor Hernandez serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Legal Education, and the Latino Studies Journal published by Palgrave Macmillan Press. Professor Hernandez's scholarly interest is in the study of comparative race relations and anti-discrimination law, and her work in that area has been published in the California Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Harvard Civil Rights Civil Liberties Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal amongst other publications.
Arturo Arias (Ph.D., Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales). John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Professor in the Humanities, School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts at the University of California, Merced. Arias has held positions at the University of Texas at Austin, University of Auckland, University of Oregon, Tulane University, and Stanford University. His research interests include contemporary Indigenous literatures, cultures, and ontologies; Central American-American Studies, a field originally theorized by Arias, which now constitutes a part of Latinx Cultural Studies; and Latin American decolonial studies. He has published Recovering Lost Footprints: Contemporary Maya Narratives. Volumes 1 (2017), and 2 (2018), Taking their Word: Literature and the Signs of Central America (2007), and The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy (2000), among other academic books. Twice winner of the Casa de las Americas Award, and winner of the Anna Seghers Award for fiction in Germany, he received the Miguel Angel Asturias National Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature in 2008 in his native Guatemala.
Vicki Ruiz, an award-winning scholar at the University of California, Irvine, is the author, editor, or coeditor of several books, including From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (1998); with Ellen Carol DuBois, Unequal Sisters: An Inclusive Reader in U.S. Women's History (4th edition, 2008); and, with Virginia Sanchez Korrol, Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia (2006). A past president of the OAH, the American Historical Association, the American Studies Association, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association, she is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Society of American Historians as well as a recipient of the 2014 National Humanities Medal for pioneering the history of twentieth-century Latinas.
Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes is Professor and Chair of the Department of American Culture and former director and core faculty member of the Latina/o Studies Program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is also Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of Women’s and Gender Studies. Born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, he received his AB from Harvard (1991) and his MA, MPhil, and PhD from Columbia (1999). He is author of Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) and of Escenas transcaribeñas: Ensayos sobre teatro, performance y cultura (Isla Negra Editores, 2018) and coeditor with Deborah R. Vargas and Nancy Raquel Mirabal of Keywords for Latina/o Studies (New York University Press, 2017). His book Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2021 as part of the Triangulations: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Theater/Drama/Performance series and received the 2021-2022 Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from CLAGS, the Center for LGBTQ Studies at the City University of New York. He has coedited queer issues of CENTRO Journal, Sargasso, and Hostos Review/Revista Hostosiana and has published two books of fiction, Uñas pintadas de azul/Blue Fingernails and Abolición del pato. Larry performs in drag as Lola von Miramar since 2010, and has appeared in several episodes of the YouTube series Cooking with Drag Queens.