Paul Joseph López Oro, PhD
Paul Joseph López Oro is the CSRC’s Institute of American Cultures visiting scholar for 2022-23. López Oro is a transdisciplinary Black studies scholar whose teaching and research closely examines Black Latin American and U.S. Black Latinx social movements, hemispheric mobilizations and migrations, and Black feminist queer theories and ethnographies. During his year in residency he will be working on his book manuscript, tentatively titled “Indigenous Blackness in the Américas: The Queer Politics of Self-Making Garifuna New York.” The study is a critical ethnography of how gender and sexuality shape the ways in which transgenerational Garifuna New Yorkers of Central American descent negotiate, perform, and articulate their multiple subjectivities as Black/Indigenous/Central American Caribbeans. He is an associate professor in the department of sociology at Hunter College, City University of New York.
Stacy I. Macias, PhD
Stacy I. Macias is an associate professor in the department of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at California State University, Long Beach. Before earning a Ph.D. in Gender Studies from UCLA, she co-founded Tongues, a queer, lesbian, and bisexual women of color project and zine and created the lesbian and bisexual women’s program, L.U.N.A (Latinas Understanding the Need for Action) at Bienestar. Her research and teaching interests are in feminist of color knowledge production; feminist transnational activisms; and Chicana feminist cultural politics including queer of color femininities, butch-femme desire, and lesbian of color counter-publics. Her recently published works include, "Somos contra la ‘queer-ificacíon’”/ “We reject the queer-ification of lesbianism”: lesbian political identity and anti-queer politics among Mexican lesbians and queer Chicanas-Latinas,” in the Journal of Lesbian Studies; “A Gay Bar, Some Familia, and Latina Butch-Femme: Rounding out the Eastside Circle at El Monte’s Sugar Shack” in the edited collection, East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte, and “Latina and Chicana Butch/Femme in Literature and Culture” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. She is co-editor with Liliana Gonzalez of the Journal of Lesbian Studies forthcoming special issue, “Chicana Lesbians: Re-Engaging the Iconic Text ‘The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About.’ Through UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center, she is working with The Latina Futures, 2050 Lab to draw attention to the critical contributions of self-identified U.S. Latina lesbian women, including how they catalyzed social change that would positively impact future generations of Latinas, LGBTQ communities, and the overall social, cultural, and political conditions of Latina/o/x/s in the U.S.
Daniel Millán, PhD
Daniel Millán is a 2022-23 UCLA Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of American Cultures and the CSRC. Daniel earned a PhD in sociology with an emphasis in Chicana/o Latina/o Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He has researched immigrant families and the experiences of undocumented young adults. His current research explores the consequences of a prolonged lack of inclusive immigration policy for members of Latina/o mixed-status immigrant families.
Brenda Lara, PhD candidate
Brenda Selena Lara is a doctoral candidate in the UCLA César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies and a CSRC IUPLR/UIC-Mellon Dissertation Fellow for 2022-23. Born and raised in Huntington Park, California, she is a first-generation student whose strong, hardworking Mexican mother taught her feminist values. Lara’s upbringing influences her historical and theoretical research, which analyzes LGBTQ+ Latinxs’s lives, knowledge, deaths, and cultural depictions. Her dissertation, “Epistemic Haunting: Queer Latinx Ghosts in Academia,” theorizes epistemic haunting as a framework for understanding queer Latinx scholars’ knowledge and the social violence they face. Lara has been awarded the Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellowship, the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies Fellowship, and a UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship. She is a UCLA First-Generation Graduate Student Councilmember and the editor of Queer Cats: A Journal of LGBTQ Studies.
Arón Montenegro, PhD candidate
Arón Montenegro is a doctoral candidate in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance and a CSRC 2022-23 IUPLR-Mellon Dissertation Fellow. His dissertation project, “Entre Flor y Fusil: Central American Arts Production and a Collective Memory of Resistance,” focuses on the role of art in sustaining a collective memory of the Central American diaspora in the United States. An oral history project that incorporates archival research and critical social theory, the dissertation highlights the legacy of international solidarity efforts supporting Central American social movements and migrant communities. Montenegro is also the arts coordinator for Homies Unidos, a violence prevention program that works with recently arrived immigrants in the MacArthur Park area of Los Angeles.
2022-23 HSI UCLA Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellows
