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  Catherine S. Ramirez

Catherine S. Ramirez

Professor & Chair

831-459-3020

 

she, her, her, hers, herself

Social Sciences Division

Latin American & Latino Studies
Merrill College

Professor & Chair

Faculty

Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas
History of Art/Visual Culture

Regular Faculty

American Studies
Border Studies
Chicana/o Studies
Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
Cultural Studies
Feminist Studies
Gender Studies
Immigration
Latin American and Latino Studies
Literature

Merrill College Academic Building
108

Winter 2024: Monday, 8-10am. Please email me to schedule an appointment.

Merrill/Crown Faculty Services

I'm Professor and chair of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

From 2013 to 2018, I directed UC Santa Cruz’s Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas (formerly the Chicano Latino Research Center).

In 2014, my colleagues and I launched our doctoral program, the first in the world to link Latinx studies and Latin American studies. I help shape and expand these fields and I work for a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive university via my program-building, advising, mentoring, teaching, and leadership. 

In addition to UC Santa Cruz's Excellence in Teaching Award, I've won grants and fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, UC Online, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. 

I'm a first-generation college graduate and have a PhD in ethnic studies and a BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley. 

For my CV and more information about me and my work, please visit my website.

  • Latinx literature, history, visual culture & performance
  • Feminist & gender studies
  • Comparative ethnic studies
  • Latinxfuturism 

My expertise includes Latinx literature, visual culture, and performance; Mexican American women's history; zoot suits and style politics; immigration and assimilation; historical memory and erasure; and speculative fiction. 

I'm the author of Assimilation: An Alternative History (University of California Press, 2020) and The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory (Duke University Press, 2009).

With Sylvanna M. Falcón, Steven C. McKay, Juan Poblete, and Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, I'm coeditor of Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship (Rutgers University Press, 2021). With A. Naomi Paik, I co-edit the Borderlands Section of Public Books.

Since 2002, I've published more than a dozen essays about Latinx speculative fiction, a field I helped build with my catalytic 2004 article, "Deus Ex Machina: Tradition, Technology, and the Chicanafuturist Art of Marion C. Martinez."

I've also written for The New York TimesThe Atlantic, and The Washington Post.   

What I'm up to these days: With Jonathan X. Inda and Rebecca Schreiber, I'm coediting Bioprecarity: Latinx Migrants, Captivity, and Resistance, a volume that grows out of our 2022-24 Crossing Latinidades Andrew W. Mellon grant. For Public Books, I'm coediting with A. Naomi Paik a series marking the centenary of the Immigration Act of 1924. I'm also developing two book projects: Consuelo's Children bridges my work on migration and speculative fiction and Latinx Studies: A Primer intervenes in the ongoing culture wars by offering teachers and program-builders an accessible guide for implementing and growing Latinx studies in secondary and higher education. 

  • Latinx literature
  • Immigrant storytelling
  • Speculative fiction, Afrofuturism and Latinxfuturism
  • Immigration and assimilation
  • Introduction to Latin American and Latinx studies (in process)
  • Comparison as method in the humanities and qualitative social sciences
  • Research in Practice 
  • Global Internship (Buenos Aires, Argentina)
  • Latin American Spain (Madrid, Spain, starting Summer 2025) 

 

LALS 100B: Cultural Theory in the Americas
LALS 112: Immigration & Assimilation
LALS 131: Latinx Literature
LALS 137: Speculative Fiction & Chicanafuturism
LALS 190G: Global Internship
LALS 194A: Immigrant Storytelling
LALS 201: Research in Practice
LALS 205: Comparison as Method

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