American Studies Welcomes Perla Guerrero

American Studies welcomes our newest faculty member in U.S. Latina/o Studies.

The Department of American Studies has just completed a national search for the first core faculty member in U. S. Latina/o Studies. Dr. Mary Corbin Sies chaired the search committee, which consisted of Dr. Sheri Parks, Dr. Jeffrey McCune, Dr. Ana Patricia Rodriguez (SPAN), Jacob Crider, Dr. Alberto Cabrera (EDHI), Maria Vargas, and Ana Perez (WMST). The committee members represented a mixture of faculty, graduate student, and undergraduate voices from both the department and the USLT Advisory Board.

The committee invited three fine candidates to campus for interviews and the result is that Dr. Perla Guerrero will be joining us in the fall as an assistant professor. Dr. Guerrero earned a Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California in 2010, and she is currently a Smithsonian Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Museum of American History. Dr. Guerrero‚s research spans the areas of human geography, Latina/o Studies, Comparative Ethnic Studies, and studies of the New South. Her dissertation, ‚ïImpacting Arkansas: Vietnamese and Cuban Refugees and Latina/o Immigrants, 1975-2005,‚ñ focuses on the racialization of Vietnamese and Cuban refugees with a focus on how local, state, and federal agencies responded to their arrival. Dr. Guerrero is revising her dissertation into the manuscript, Race, Labor, and Place: Asians and Latinas/os Remaking Arkansas, in which she traces the arrival and racialization of refugees and immigrants in the last quarter of the 20th century. We look forward to having Dr. Guerrero join us in the fall.