Emma Pérez

Dr. Emma Pérez earned a PH.D. in history from UCLA and taught in the Department of History at the University of Texas, El Paso from 1990 to 2003, where she also functioned as Chair. From 2003 to 2017, she taught in the Department of Ethnic Studies at University of Colorado, Boulder, also serving as Chair and ushering in the Department's Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies, Perez has published fiction, essays, and the history monography, "The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History" (1999), which has been cited in several disciplines.  

Perez's first novel, "Gulf Dreams," was published in 1996 and is considered one of th first Chicana lesbian novels in print.  Her second novel, "Forgetting the Alamo, or Blood Memory" (2009) won the Christopher Isherwood Writing Grant (2009) as well as the National Association for Chicana/Chicano Studies Regional Book Award for fiction (2011). Her latest novel, "Electra's Complex," is an erotic, academic mystery published in Spring 2015. She continues to research and write about LGBT Chicanx/Mexicanx in the borderlands through her two latest projects, "The Will to Feel: Decolonial Methods, Queer and Otherwise," which promises to be a brief study that interrogates the coloniality of feelings. The second project is a dystopic novel, "I, Ben Espinoza," which probes a colonial global order run by the wealthy one percent. In the Southwest Center, Emma is Research Social Scientist with teaching responsibilites in Gender and Women's Studies.