Guadalupe Escobar, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Gender, Race, and Identity and English
Guadalupe Escobar

Summary

Guadalupe Escobar holds a joint faculty position in English and Gender, Race, and Identity. Her highly interdisciplinary work focuses on contemporary literature of the Americas and, in particular, transamerican decolonial expression in the context of U.S. intervention and its aftermath. Her current book project, Decolonial Witnessing: The Post-Cold War Testimonio of Human Rights, analyzes Latin American and Latinx literary and visual representations that expand how the testimonio genre continues to operate into the twenty-first century. It develops the analytic of decolonial witnessing—making U.S.-supported state violence perceptible—to demonstrate how human rights figures confront Cold War afterlives in the present.

She is a recipient of a postdoctoral fellowship from New York University, as well as a Fulbright Global Scholar Award that supported research in Mexico and the Philippines during the summer of 2022. Currently, she is serving on the MLA Executive Committee for Hemispheric American Literature.

Dr. Escobar has been awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and will be on leave from 2023-2024.

Courses taught

  • Latinx Literary and Cultural Studies
  • Latina Feminisms
  • Feminist Theory
  • Gender, Literature, and the Arts
  • Race and Gender in Coming-of-Age Narratives
  • U.S. Writers of Color

Research interests

  • Hemispheric American studies
  • Chicanx and Latinx studies
  • Critical ethnic studies
  • Gender and sexuality studies
  • Life writing
  • Documentary filmmaking

Publications

  • "The Critical DREAMer Memoir: Educational Mobility and the Limits of Meritocratic Citizenship.” American Literature 95.1 (March 2023): 29-58.
  • “Rethinking Refugeeness in Diasporic Documentaries,” Teaching Central American Literature in a Global Context, edited by Gloria Chacón and Mónica Albizúrez, MLA Options for Teaching, 2022, pp. 275-285.
  • "Testimonio at 50." Latin American Perspectives 48.2 (March 2021): 17-32.
  • "Toward a Willful Rereading of The Revolt of the Cockroach People." Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 44.1 (Spring 2019): 53-82.

Education

  • Ph.D., English, University of California, Los Angeles, 2014
  • M.A., English, University of California, Los Angeles, 2009
  • B.A., English, Philosophy (Law & Society) and Spanish, University of California, Riverside, 2004