Claudia Milian

Claudia Milian is an Associate Professor of Romance Studies at Duke University. A scholar of Latino/a Studies, she  works in comparative and interdisciplinary studies and forges intersections among the vast intellectual traditions of Latina/o Studies, Latin American Studies, African American Studies, southern studies, and hemispheric American Studies. Her areas of inquiry push for broader geographies, flows, circulations, and epistemologies wherein a global Latino/a Studies has an active and equal voice in academic disciplines. Milian’s mélange of scholarly interests lie in cultural studies; critical race theory; the genomic era; citizenship; decoloniality; climate change and environmental degradation; the global south; twentieth-century U.S., Latin American, Latino/a, and African American literature; and translation studies.

She is the author of Latining America: Black-Brown Passages and the Coloring of Latino/a Studies (University of Georgia Press, 2013), a monograph that charts a different but coeval path for how cultural signifiers for the U.S. Latino or Latina have been accessed by an unexpected circle of Latin participants: U.S. African Americans, brown-dark brown Latinos and Latinas, and “problematic” subgroups like Central Americans.  Milian is actively at work on her second book project, titled Deracination Americana. In it, she considers the creation and dissemination of global Latino/a cultures with particular attention to the contrasts in how they are localized and intellectually incorporated in the global south. This study is preoccupied with Latinoness and Latinaness as forms of deracination that bring about distinct articulations of a subject that are not bound to nation but are linked by different patterns of emergence, national detachments, varying degrees of “homelessness,” new socially and politically constructed families, and DNA testing and the formation of an international “Latino” genetic ethnicity.

Milian serves as an Associate Editor at Cultural Dynamics.

←Back