Arturo Arias is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Endowed Professor in Humanities in the School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts at UC Merced. Working in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, his research interests emphasize Indigenous Studies with a special emphasis on Indigenous literatures and critical race theory. His research focuses on Mesoamerican Indigenous literatures and cultures, and Central American & Latina/o cultural studies. Arias was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2020 for his trilogy of books titled, “Recovering Lost Footprints: Contemporary Indigenous Narratives.” In the third volume of his collection, Arias provides a ground-breaking study that explores contemporary indigenous novels from Guatemala and Mexico.

As part of the Global Latinidades Consortium, Arias will coordinate the interdisciplinary excavation of a new understanding of the linguistic and cultural heritage of Central American indigenous communities as well as new Latinx indigenous groups, cultures, and practices in the US. His research shifts the formation of Latinx identity away from a common Spanish linguistic heritage toward the divergent indigenous communities under the Latinx umbrella with distinct linguistic, cultural, and literary heritage.