Maritza Cárdenas

Maritza Cárdenas is a member of the Executive Committee of the UArizona Human Rights Practice Program. An Associate Professor of English, she is also a faculty affiliate for Latin American Studies, the Program in Social Cultural, Critical Theory and the Institute of LGBTQ studies at the University of Arizona. She received her doctorate and master’s degree from the University of Michigan’s program of American Culture, and her bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern California’s department in Comparative Literature. Her research and teaching interests focus on US Central Americans, Latinx cultural productions, marginalized identities and subjectivities, disability studies, and transnational community formations. A recipient of the Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellowship, she is the author of Constituting Central American-Americans: Transnational Identities and the Politics of Dislocation (Rutgers 2018), which highlights the historical, socio-political processes that have facilitated the construction of a pan-ethnic transnational cultural identity (Central American) to emerge in the US diaspora. Her work has also been published in journals such as Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial studies, Symbolism, Oxford Encyclopedia of Latina/o Literature and in the anthologies Race and Contention in Twenty-First Century US Media (2016), and U.S. Central Americans: Reconstructing Memories, Struggles, and Communities of Resistance (2017). Her current research examines the interconnections between disability studies and Latinx studies by focusing on how disability discourse reinforces ideologies of race, gender/sexuality and normalcy.