Keynote Speaker

Claudia Milian, a scholar of Latino/a Studies, works in comparative and interdisciplinary studies and forges intersections among the vast intellectual traditions of Latina/o Studies, Latin American Studies, African American Studies, southern studies, and hemispheric American Studies. Her areas of inquiry push for broader geographies, flows, circulations, and epistemologies wherein a global Latino/a Studies has an active and equal voice in academic disciplines. Milian’s mélange of scholarly interests lie in cultural studies; critical race theory; the genomic era; citizenship; decoloniality; climate change and environmental degradation; the global south; twentieth-century U.S., Latin American, Latino/a, and African American literature; and translation studies.

She is the author of Latining America: Black-Brown Passages and the Coloring of Latino/a Studies (University of Georgia Press, 2013), a monograph that disentangles how––and under what terms––the Latino category emerges and comes into being. Latining America explores how U.S. Latinoness is passed through and lived in ways that exceed dominant phenotypic narratives of brown embodiment.

Milian’s second book project analyzes the process of migration and the process of movement: not the crossover, but the physical trek by Central American migrants through the Guatemala-Mexico border as well as through those who choose to go further south in the isthmus, to places like Costa Rica. She is looking at the bottom of the Central American map, attempting to look up––to Mexico, to the United States, and to the plurality of borders subjects cross, defying the illusion that there’s only one physical border, the U.S.–Mexico border.

Milian is an Associate Editor for the academic journal Cultural Dynamics; serves as a member of the Advisory Board for the New Southern Studies Series from the University of Georgia Press; and sits on the Editorial Advisory Board for Duke University Press.

She is editing a special issue of Cultural Dynamics, slated for an August 2016 publication date, on “Theorizing Latinx.” She is also the co-editor of two special journal issues: the Fall 2012 edition of The Global South on “Interoceanic Diasporas and The Panama Canal’s Centennial” and the Summer 2013 volume of Latino Studies on “U.S. Central Americans: Representations, Agency, and Communities.”

Her writings have appeared in various publications, among them: The Cambridge Companion to Latina/o American Literature; Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination; A Companion to African American Studies; The Latin American Fashion Reader; and A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies; LASA Forum.