Faculty Mentors
Andrea Mays
Dr. Mays, is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Africana Studies at the University of New Mexico. She has taught courses in the UNM Department of American Studies and the Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program. Her teaching and scholarship focus on African American and Black Atlantic Culture and Politics, Visual Culture Studies, and Black Feminist Studies. Her research interests include Black Atlantic expressions of critical and resistance politics in visual and literary culture. She teaches courses on Black Art, Black Feminism, Film, Literature, Afrofuturism, and the fiction of Octavia Butler. Dr. Mays’ public scholarship includes essays and articles published in USA Today, The Albuquerque Journal, The Santa Fe Reporter, IKON Feminism Commemorative Digital Archive, Morgan State University Global Journalism Review, and the film Letters to Our Daughters directed by native New Mexican filmmaker Christopher Roybal, narrated by Dolores Huerta, Co-Founder and First Vice President Emeritus of the United Farm Workers of America, AFL-CIO.
Bernadine Hernández
Dr. Bernadine Hernández is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of New Mexico. She specializes in transnational feminism and sexual economies of the US-Mexico borderlands, along with American Literary Studies and Empire, border and migration history, and Chicana/Latina Literature and Sexualities. Her book with UNC press is titled Border Bodies: Racialized Sexuality, Sexual Capital, and Violence in the Nineteenth Century Borderlands and is the first book length study that focuses on sexual capital and gender and sexual violence in the borderlands in the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries through recovered archival work. She is also the co-editor of the first edited collection on Ana Castillo titled New Transnational Chicanx Perspectives on Ana Castillo, published with University of Pittsburg Press in Spring 2021.
Ray Hernandez Duran
Dr. Ray Hernandez Duran is currently Professor of Spanish Colonial Art and Architecture in the Department of Art at UNM and is affiliated with Latin American Studies, Chicana/Chicano Studies, Africana Studies, and Museum Studies. He received his Doctorate in Pre-Hispanic and Colonial Latin American Art at The University of Chicago. And completed his M.A. in the Art of Africa and the African Diaspora at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research centers on a critical exploration of historiography, colonialism, institutional histories and practices, and the political nature of knowledge production.
David Weiss
Dr. David Weiss teaches courses in strategic communication, political communication, and media studies. His research interests include media discourse, political and religious communication, and the media and popular culture industries. Before his return to academia in 2000, Dr. Weiss worked in the advertising agency business in New York City for almost two decades. He has taught in Oregon, Ohio, and Montana, and is thrilled to be back at UNM, where he earned his Ph.D. degree in 2005. His work manifested in two distinct research and publication streams: (1) political communication and, in particular, its intersection with religious communication; and (2) linguistic manifestations of identity in media and popular culture. He is in the early stages of a project situated at the intersection of media theory (specifically, normative theories of journalism) and the political economy of media.
Myrriah Gómez
Dr. Myrriah Gómez, an Associate Professor at the Honors College, is from the Pojoaque Valley in northern New Mexico. She earned her Doctorate in English with an emphasis in Latina/o Studies from the University of Texas at San Antonio and is a 2011 Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow. She is Director of Southwest Hispanic Research Institute (SHRI) and Affiliated Faculty in the Department of American Studies at UNM. Her monograph, Nuclear Nuevo México: Colonialism and the Effects of the Nuclear Industrial Complex on Nuevomexicanos, examines the effects of settler colonialism and the nuclear industrial complex in New Mexico. Her second book project is an analysis of literature pertaining to nuclear culture written by people of color.
Marcella Ernest (Ojibwe)
Marcella is an interdisciplinary artist and Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of New Mexico. Her research areas are on the varying relationships between Native art and history, sound studies, remix culture, archival analysis, queer Indigenous critique, and land justice. The Art History courses she teaches at UNM consider a range of theoretical approaches and methodologies for the anti-colonial study of Indigenous visuality and soundscapes.
She received a PhD in American Studies from the University of New Mexico, an MA from the University of Washington’s Native Voices program for Indigenous documentary film and research methodologies, and a BA in Ethnic Studies from Mills College. Marcella is Gunflint Lake Ojibwe and an enrolled member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior and has heritage that includes Eastern European ancestry.
Francisco Galarte
Dr. Francisco Galarte is an Associate Professor of American Studies and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of New Mexico where he teaches courses in Chicanx, Latinx and transgender studies. He was born and raised in Brawley, California located in the Imperial Valley along the US/Mexico Border and identifies strongly as a transfronterizo, meaning that the borderlands inform his creative and scholarly projects. His most recent articles have appeared in publications including Aztlan: Journal of Chicano Studies, Chicana/Latina Studies Journal and TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. He holds a PhD in Educational Policy Studies with a minor in Latina and Latino Studies from the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign.
Kathy Powers
Professor Kathy Powers is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of New Mexico. She is interested in the nature of institutional authority as well as institutional change and effects. Much of her present research focuses on the design of international institutions and law with respect to human rights, restorative justice, trade, and war. Specifically, she examines the institutional and legal determinants of transitional justice in the form of global reparations efforts following mass human rights violations, the international legal personality of international organizations, and how regional economic institutions that transform into military organizations impact war.
Professor Powers has published her research in diverse venues such as the Journal of Conflict Resolution, the Journal of Peace Research, International Interactions, Foreign Policy Analysis, the Review of International Studies, and the NAACP Special Edition. The National Science Foundation has supported her research on numerous occasions. She was recently awarded multiple fellowships to conduct research for her book Making Amends: The Institutional and Legal Landscape of Global Reparations while in residency at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, D.C.
Renée Faubion
Renée Faubion earned a B.A. in Russian, French, and Eastern European Studies at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, and an M.A. in Slavic Languages and Literature from the University of Kansas. Realizing that the track she was on was likely to take her to a career in the diplomatic corps or business, she switched to English; this allowed her to pursue a career in teaching while indulging her love of British and American literature. She earned a second M.A. and a Ph.D. in English from the University of New Mexico, and she has had the pleasure of teaching in the Honors College at UNM since 2000.
Renée’s areas of interest center around cultural studies—how different artifacts, such as fiction, images, academic texts, and popular narratives, can be dissected to help us understand the stories we tell ourselves about what we value. She is particularly interested in how communities address gender performance and in how they define and respond to difference.
Leola Tsinnajinnie Paquin
Leola Tsinnajinnie Paquin, Ph.D. [Diné/Filipina & traditionally accepted into Santa Ana Pueblo] is an Associate Professor at the University of New Mexico (UNM) in Native American Studies. She earned a BA in Sociology and an MA in American Indian Studies from the University of Arizona. She obtained her PhD in Educational Thought and Sociocultural Studies from UNM. She taught at the tribal college Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute before joining NAS as a full-time faculty member. Her research and service activities focus on Indigenous educational sovereignty and wellbeing. She is a member of the Institute for American Indian Education (IAIE), Online Course Advisory Council having earned Golden Paw Certification, and a longtime member of the UNM Diversity Council Curriculum Subcommittee. She has been an Expanding Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences Faculty Fellow, Student Experience Project Fellow and an Academic Affairs General Education Faculty Fellow on Race and Social Justice. Beyond UNM, she has also served as President of the American Indian Studies Association Council and on the New Mexico American Civil Liberties Union Board of Directors.