Karen R. Roybal holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of New Mexico and her specializations include Southwest Studies, nineteenth-century Chicanx and Latinx literature and history, and Cultural Studies. She teaches courses in literature, arts and culture, archival studies, Southwest/Borderlands history, and environmental justice. In her research and teaching, Dr. Roybal employs a Chicana feminist epistemology to confront dominant patriarchal narratives about the making of the U.S. Southwest. Her book, entitled Archives of Dispossession: Recovering the Testimonios of Mexican American Herederas, 1848-1960, was published by University of North Carolina Press in September 2017. In it, she argues that a feminist reframing and recovery of archives central to the territories lost by Mexico and won by the United States in the Mexican-American War expose the matrilineal dimensions of property ownership and herencia—inheritance, legacy, and heritage—and the resistance and negotiation by women of Spanish/Mexican descent after 1848. Dr. Roybal’s work has been published in Southwestern American Literature; Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies; and Culture, Theory and Critique. Her latest essay, “Hidden Histories: Gendered and Settler Colonial Landscapes in Northern California,” will be published in the Fall 2018 issue of the peer-reviewed journal, Chicana/Latina Studies.

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