Roberto Macias Jr. is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He received his M.A. and B.A. from the Department of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) where he worked under the guidance of Chicana feminist theorists Sonia Saldívar-Hull and Norma Alarcón. In addition, Roberto worked closely with Ben V. Olguín, including as a research assistant for his book, La Pinta: Chicana/o Prisoner Literature, Culture, and Politics (University of Texas Press, 2010). 

His research areas include Latinx literature and cultural theory, Critical Gender and Sexuality Studies, and 20th-century Continental Philosophy. Roberto’s dissertation, “‘The Infinite Nonentity’: Existential Guilt, Masculinity, and the Political in Contemporary Chicanx Autobiography and Memoir” revisits the Chicanx literary canon in order to demystify masculinity in these texts by highlighting an unacknowledged existential masculine guilt that permeates this literature and allows for the potential to reconceptualize normative Western conceptualizations of the political itself. He is a UCSB Division of Humanities and Fine Arts Dean’s Prize Teaching Fellow and a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow. 

As part of the Global Latinidades Project, Roberto collaborated on the creation of the center's “Pro-seminar: Grants and Fellowships Applications Workshop,” which guides graduate and advanced undergraduate students through the production and development of their application materials to graduate school, research grants, dissertation fellowships, and postdoctoral fellowships. Furthermore, he is currently serving as co-curator of a special double-dossier for Aztlán: A Journal of Chicana/o Studies on global latinidades.