Cristina Perez Assistant Professor of American Studies

Research

Cristina Jo Pérez studies the violence of US immigration policy and practices.  Her current book project, On Border Time: Chrononationalism and the Rise of the Border Industrial Complex, traces the state’s discourses of national (un)belonging, its acts of epistemic and physical harm against Mexican migrants, and its commitments to private interests in border policing. Her teaching and research interests include Latinx studies, border and immigration studies, queer of color critique, and temporality studies. She comes to F&M after having served as a National Center for Institutional Diversity Research Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, the Mellon/ACLS Visiting Assistant Professor in Comparative Border Studies at the University of California, Davis, and a SHASS Diversity Predoctoral Fellow in Women’s Studies at MIT. Cristina was raised in El Paso, Texas. 

Education

Ph.D.             University of Maryland - College Park, Women’s Studies, 2016

M.A.T.            Western New Mexico University – Gallup Graduate Studies Center, 2009

B.A.                Willamette University, Politics and Women’s Studies, 2006

Publications

Cristina Jo Pérez. (Feb 2022) “Performing the State’s Desire: Hypermobility as Threat, the Domination of the Border Industrial Complex, and the Murder of Anastasio Hernández Rojas,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, 43 (1), 93-119, doi:10.1353/fro.2022.0003.

Cristina Jo Pérez, Robert McKee Irwin, John Guzman. (Dec 2019). “Global Border Industrial Complexes: Genealogies, Epistemologies, Sexualities.” [Special issue]. Tabula Rasa: Revista de Humanidades.

Cristina Jo Pérez. “La Violencia del Complejo Industrial de la Frontera. (The Violence of the Border Industrial Complex.)” Revista Transas: Letras y Artes de América Latina. December 2016.