Celeste Menchaca
Biography
Celeste R. Menchaca is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Southern California where she specializes in nineteenth century U.S-Mexico borderlands history. She has published in Pacific Historical Review, Journal of American Ethnic History, and California History. Her article “Staging Crossings: Policing Intimacy and Performing Respectability at the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1907-1917,” won the Jensen Miller Award from the Western Historical Association (2021) and the Barbara “Penny” Kanner Award from the Western Association of Women Historians (2022). Her current book manuscript explores how the nineteenth-century U.S.-Mexico border became a site of scientific fieldwork, where researchers and scientists manufactured the border, constituted themselves, and racialized communities.
Education
- Ph.D. American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California, 2016
- M.A. American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California, 2012
- B.A. Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego, 2007
- B.A. History, University of California, San Diego, 2007
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- Postdoctoral Ford Foundation Fellowship, Southern Methodist University, 2018-2019
- Clements Center for Southwest Studies Fellowship, Southern Methodist University, 2018-2019
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Tenure Track Appointments
- Assistant Professor of History, Texas Christian University, 2016 – 2020
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Journal Article
- Menchaca, C. (2020). ‘The Freedom of Jail’: Women, Detention, and Immigration Governance along the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1903-1917. Journal of American Ethnic History. Vol. 39 (4), pp. 27-41. abstract
- Menchaca, C. (2020). Staging Crossings: Policing Intimacy and Performing Respectability at the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1907-1917. Pacific Historical Review. Vol. 89 (1), pp. 16-43. abstract
- Menchaca, C., Baumgarten, M. D., Fukumori, R., Lynch, D. (2016). Deep Los Angeles, A Roundtable on Histories of Los Angeles in the Twenty-First Century. California History. Vol. 93 (3), pp. 92-101. abstract