Alicia Gaspar de Alba

A photo of Alicia Gaspar de Alba
E-mail: agdealba@ucla.edu Office: 7367 Bunche Hall

Professor Alicia Gaspar de Alba is a celebrated writer and scholar. A founding faculty member and former chair of the UCLA César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o Studies (2007-2010), Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s work explores gender and sexuality, Chicana/o art, popular culture, and border studies. Known to her students as La Profe or Gaspar, she teaches courses on border consciousness, bilingual creative writing, Chicana lesbian literature, and barrio popular culture, as well as graduate courses on Chicana feminist theory, aesthetics of place, and Latin@ noir. In addition to her work in Chicana/o Studies, Gaspar has also served as Chair of the LGBTQ Studies Interdepartmental Minor Program. Gaspar’s doctoral dissertation “Mi Casa [No] Es Su Casa: The Cultural Politics of the Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation Exhibit” won the 1994 Ralph Henry Gabriel American Studies Association Award for Best Dissertation, and is the basis for her 1998 book, Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master’s House. She also received a 1993 Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship and a 1992 Chicana Dissertation Fellowship from the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1999, she was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship for Latino/a Cultural Study at the Smithsonian. In 2008, she was awarded the UCLA Gold Shield Faculty Award for Academic Excellence.

Education

  • PhD, American Studies, University of New Mexico (1994)
  • MA, English-Creative Writing Concentration, University of Texas at El Paso (1983)
  • BA, English, University of Texas at El Paso (1980)

Research

  • Chicano/a Art
  • Popular Culture
  • Border Studies
  • Gender and Sexuality
  • The Maquiladora Murders
  • Femicide
  • Creative Writing

Courses

  • CCAS 201: “Activist Scholarship and Intersectional Methodologies” (Winter 2022)
  • CCAS CM135/LGBTQS M135/GENDER M135C: “Bilingual Writing Workshop” (Fall 2021)
  • CCAS 253: “Tenth Muses of Chicana Theory” (Fall 2021)
  • CCAS 191: “Femicide: Death, Gender, and Border” (Spring 2021)
  • CCAS/LGBTQS/GENDER M133: “Chicana Lesbian Literature” (Winter 2021)

For descriptions of the above courses, please visit the Chicana/o and Central American Studies catalog.

Publications

[Un]Framing the “Bad Woman”: Sor Juana, Malinche, Coyolxauhqui and Other Rebels With a Cause (Univ. of Texas Press, 2014); for more publications, please see my website.