Sandra Soto
Sandra K. Soto is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona, editor of Feminist Formations, and co-editor of The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latino Literature. For the 2016 calendar year, she is the Winton Chair in the Liberal Arts and Visiting Professor at The University of Minnesota (American Studies and Chicano & Latino Studies). She holds a PhD in English, with a focus in Ethnic and Third World Literature, from the University of Texas at Austin. Her book, Reading Chican@ Like a Queer: The De-Mastery of Desire (2010), replaces the race-based oppositional paradigm of Chicano literary studies with a less didactic, more flexible, framework geared for a queer analysis of the discursive relationship between racialization and sexuality. Her interdisciplinary research and teaching interests are in Chicana/o and Latina/o literary and cultural studies, feminist theory, gender studies, and queer theory. She is currently working on a book tentatively titled “Feeling Greater Mexico,” which mobilizes queer theories of affect to pursue unlikely connections between critical transnational studies and U.S. ethnic studies. She also writes about the politics of Arizona, and in 2010, she and co-author Miranda Joseph received the NEA Excellence in the Academy Award in Democracy in Higher Education for their essay “Neoliberalism and the Battle over Ethnic Studies in Arizona.” At the University of Arizona, she is an affiliate of English, the Center for Latin American Studies, and the Mexican American Studies and Research Center.