Latinx Studies in the Midwest and Beyond Speaker Series

Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes is a scholar of American and ethnic studies, queer/LGBT Hispanic Caribbean (Cuban, Dominican, Puerto Rican) studies, and U.S. Latina/o/x and Latin American literary, cultural, and performance studies. His recent book, Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2021), focuses on migration, transvestism, and performance and argue that drag can serve not only to question gender and sexuality but also to explore commodification, cyberspace, diasporic displacements and reenactments of home, ethnicity, the human/animal divide, monstrosity, politics, poverty, race, and racial passing. He is currently working on a book on contemporary performance in Puerto Rico.

Zorimar Rivera-Montes studies Caribbean Latinx cultural literatures and popular cultures of the late 20^th and 21^st century. Her research focuses on Puerto Rican cultural texts under the combined forces of neoliberalism and coloniality, studying the impacts of colonial neoliberalism on aesthetic products. Her teaching interests include Latinx studies as a critical pedagogy, contemporary Latinx literature and popular culture, migration, borders and diaspora, popular music and performance, Caribbean decolonial thought, and labor and late capitalism in popular culture. She is currently Chair of the Puerto Rico Section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) and has served on the board of the Puerto Rican Studies Association.

Dr. Villanueva’s research interests include Urban Political Economy, Legal & Carceral Geographies, Historical Geography, Caribbean Geographies, Race, Class, & Social Theory. Dr. Villanueva is currently working on a book manuscript project that explores the Puerto Rico Planning Board in the mid twentieth century and its relation to today’s Puerto Rican debt crisis. He served as the President of the Puerto Rican Studies Association from 2020-2022.  At Gustavus Adolphus College, he teaches classes on world regional geography; introduction to human geography; urban geography; political geography; geographies of peace, crime, and violence; and sports geography.