Biography

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 served as Chair of the LGBTQ Studies Program from 2013-2019. Under her leadership, an undergraduate research conference called QScholars was started, as well as Queer Cats: A Journal of LGBTQ Studies, a graduate-student-edited eScholarship journal. Gaspar has published 12 books—among them novels, collections of poetry and short fiction, anthologies, and academicc books— and has a few more titles in the pipeline.  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 named Endowed Chair in English at the University of Texas at El Paso, and 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. Her novel on the Juarez femicides titled Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders won the 2005 Lambda Literary Foundation Award for Best Lesbian Mystery. In Fall 2019, Opera UCLA premiered “Juana,” an opera by Carla Lucero based on Gaspar’s award-winning historical novel Sor Juana’s Second Dream (1999).