Center for Regional Studies Research Scholar Joins the English Department for the Year

Dr. Karen R. Roybal

The Center for Regional Studies and the English Department are happy to announce that Dr. Karen R. Roybal, a CRS Visiting Research Scholar, will be housed in UNM’s English Department of Language and Literature for the Fall 2012 and Spring 2013 academic year.

As a CRS scholar, Dr. Roybal will work on her book manuscript, Archives of Dispossession: Uncovering Mexicana Memory through Testimonio —a project that draws on literature, land title records, and testimonios to argue that the history of Mexican land claims cannot be understood only as a racialized story, but must also be recognized as a story linked to gender. In the book, she coins the phrase testimonios de herederas to describe inherited histories of land struggle on the part of women of Mexican and/or Spanish descent. Dr. Roybal’s interdisciplinary book chronicles women’s active participation in and indispensability to the legacy of land-related struggle by focusing on a combination of archival court testimonies taken from 1854-1890 by the United States Surveyor General’s Office in New Mexico during the land adjudication process; literary-based testimonios de herederas penned by Mexican American women—such as María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Jovita González, and Fabiola Cabeza de Baca—directly and indirectly involved in land struggles from 1848-1954; and ethnographic oral history interviews provided by women engaged in the contemporary land grant movement in New Mexico. She argues that because the legacy of land grant studies has largely excluded women from view, the stakes of re-materializing women and making their active participation visible is crucial to understanding the full nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of the “violence over the land” in the U.S. Southwest.

While visiting in the English Department, Dr. Roybal is also slated to teach two courses. The first, English 315: Chicana Literature and Film, is being offered in the second eight week session of the fall semester and will provide a historical survey of Chicana literature and film in relation to gender, race, agency, and aesthetics. See the course description below. Her second class will run in the spring. She’s also working with the department on launching a Southwest Studies Institute initiative.

Dr. Roybal received her PhD in American Studies from the UNM in July 2011 as an Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Fellow, and from 2011-2012, she was a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the Latina/o Studies Department. She was recently awarded a short-term research fellowship by the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin to conduct research at the Benson Latin American library. Her broader research interests include Chicana/o, Latina/o Literature, Autobiographical Theory, Chicana/Latina Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, and Nineteenth & Twentieth Century Mexican-American History.