Faculty

Catherine S. Ramirez
  • Pronouns she, her, her, hers, herself
  • Title
    • Professor & Chair
  • Division Social Sciences Division
  • Department
    • Latin American & Latino Studies
    • Merrill College
  • Affiliations Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas, History of Art/Visual Culture, Community Studies Program
  • Phone
    831-459-3020
  • Email
  • Website
  • Office Location
    • Merrill College Academic Building, 108
  • Office Hours Winter 2023: Mon, 8-10am PT, via Zoom. Please email me for an appointment & the link.
  • Mail Stop Merrill/Crown Faculty Services
  • Mailing Address
    • 1156 High Street
    • Santa Cruz CA 95064
  • Faculty Areas of Expertise 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
  • Courses LALS 32: Citizens, Denizens, Aliens; LALS 100B: Cultural Theory in the Americas; LALS 112: Immigration & Assimilation; LALS 131: Latinx Literature; LALS 137: Speculative Fiction & Chicanafuturism; LALS 194A: Immigrant Storytelling; LALS 201: Research in Practice; LALS 205: Comparison as Method

Summary of Expertise

Latinx literary, cultural, visual, and performance studies; feminist, gender, and sexuality studies; Mexican American cultural history; comparative ethnic studies; migration and citizenship studies; speculative fiction and Latinxfuturism

Research Interests

I'm a scholar of Latinx literary, cultural, visual, and performance studies; feminist, gender, and sexuality studies; Mexican American cultural history; comparative ethnic studies; migration and citizenship studies; speculative fiction and Latinxfuturism.

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.


I've also written for The New York TimesThe Atlantic, and Boom California.   

My current research project examines the temporalities of migration, with a focus on the child migrant story and what I call undocutime, the prolonged waiting, permanent temporariness, enforced presentism, devaluation of the time, and persistent patience of the undocumented.

Biography, Education and Training

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 welcomed the first cohort of students in our doctoral program, the first in the world to link Latinx 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, fundraising, and leadership. 

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

I 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.

Honors, Awards and Grants

Selected Publications

Selected Presentations

Selected Recordings

 

Teaching Interests

I've taught an array of courses, including lectures with hundreds of undergraduates, intimate graduate seminars, surveys, composition and methods courses, and asynchronous, online courses. Notwithstanding their variety, the common thread running through my courses is my commitment to ethnic and feminist studies, evident in my use of an intersectional framework to explore the uneven distribution of power in our world and the myriad ways people have responded to that unevenness.

  • Latinx literary, cultural, visual, and performance studies

  • Migration and citizenship studies

  • Immigrant storytelling

  • Speculative fiction and Latinxfuturism

  • Comparison as method in the humanities and qualitative social sciences

  • Comparative ethnic studies

  • United States cultural, ethnic, and immigration history