Gender and Women’s Studies Program School of Interdisciplinary Programs and Community Engagement

Office: TBA
Email: cathryn.merlawatson@utrgv.edu
Profile

Cathryn Merla-Watson's research and teaching interests include Latinx literary and cultural studies; Latinx speculative aesthetics; gender and critical sexuality studies; Latina feminisms; women and queer of color theories; and feminist geography. She has published in journals such as Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies and Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the U.S. (MELUS) and chapters in anthologies, including Research Justice, edited by Andrew Jolivette, and The Un/Making of Latino Citizenship: Culture, Politics, and Aesthetics. She recently co-edited with B.V. Olguín Altermundos: Latin@ Speculative Literature, Film, and Popular Culture, the first collected works to coalesce scholarship dedicated to codifying and theorizing Latin@ speculative aesthetics.

Office: ELABN 229

Email: friederike.bruehoefener@utrgv.edu

Dr. Bruehoefener is an Associate Professor whose work focuses on post-1945 German gender history, women's history, political, and new military history. Most recently she co-edited, with Belinda Davis and Stepehen Milder, the volume Rethinking Social Movements after ’68: Selves and Solidarities in West Germany and Beyond (2022). 

Office: BSABH 2.420
Email:  silvia.solis01@utrgv.edu

Silvia Patricia Solís is a lecturer in Gender and Women’s Studies and Environmental Studies in the School of Interdisciplinary Programs and Community Engagement. She is the Art Editor of Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies. Solís was born in Heroica Matamoros, Tamaulipas, where she lived as a child. Her family later moved to Brownsville, Texas. She earned her Ph.D. in Social Foundations with a focus in Anthropology of Education from the University of Utah in 2020. Her research expands on land and place-based epistemologies, pedagogies, and methodologies by tracing saberes curativos, curative knowings, and practices people hold in relation to taking care and curing within family and community. It centers on intergenerational learning, remembering, and everyday practices in the home and gardens of Indigenous, Black, and Afro-descendant peoples in the Mesoamerican diaspora living along the U.S. Mexico border. U.S. Women of color, Indigenous Feminists, Decolonial Feminist theory are at the center of her theoretical foundations.

Other research interests: Material Feminist Theory, Environmental Racism and Justice, Food Studies, Feminist Geographies, Environmental Education, Place and Land Education, Coloniality and Settler Colonialisms.