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Joan Flores-Villalobos

Associate Professor of History
Joan Flores-Villalobos
Pronouns She / Her / Hers Email jfloresv@usc.edu

Biography

Prof. Flores-Villalobos is on leave for academic year 2026-2027 as the Dibner Research Fellow in the History of Science and Technology at the Huntington Library.

Joan Flores-Villalobos is Associate Professor in the Department of History at USC. She received her Ph.D. in African Diaspora History from New York University in 2018. She previously taught as Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University.

Her work focuses on histories of gender, race, and diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean. Her first book, The Silver Women: How Black Women’s Labor Made the Panama Canal, was published with Penn Press in 2023. Her work has garnered support from the Ford Foundation, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, the American Association of University Women, and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, among others.

At USC, Prof. Flores-Villalobos teaches courses on Latin America and the African Diaspora, U.S. empire, gender and migration, and the Caribbean.

Education

  • Ph.D. African Diaspora History, New York University, 2018
  • M.A. Media Studies, The University of Texas at Austin, 2012
  • B.A. Black Studies, Amherst College, 2010

  • Journal Article

    • Flores-Villalobos, J. (2022). Reputación, racismo, género y honor en las cortes municipales de la Ciudad de Panamá, 1914-1917. Historia Crítica. (85), pp. 51-73. Full Text
    • Flores-Villalobos, J. (2021). Gender, Race, and Migrant Labor in the “Domestic Frontier” of the Panama Canal Zone. International Labor and Working-Class History. Vol. 99, pp. 96-121.
    • Flores-Villalobos, J. (2019). “Freak Letters”: Tracing Gender, Race, and Diaspora in the Panama Canal Archive. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. Vol. 23 (2), pp. 34-56.
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