Michael Andrew Parra completed his B.A. in English (African American Studies minor) at the University of California Berkeley in 2012 and later obtained his M.A. in English Literature in 2018 at San Francisco State University. His master’s research focused on the relationship fiction has with empirical reality and historical realities, and how that differed from nonfiction, particularly philosophy, and law. Understanding that authors organize the disorderly, chaotic world in written form, Parra’s thesis project, Breaking Through Ideology: Deconstructing “I” and the “Me” Who is Not “Myself,” immerses into the fiction/nonfiction binary to address the following question: what is being organized and made orderly in the structure of the narrative form of the novel?

He is an English Ph.D. student at the University of California Santa Barbara, with doctoral emphases in Feminist Studies and Global Studies, as well as a 2022 Ford Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellow. At the doctoral level, Parra has attained admissions into Cornel's School of Criticism & Theory (Summer 2022), Harvard's Institute for World Literature (Summer 2023), and El Colegio de México's International Summer Program (Summer 2024) in Ciudad de México. 

His doctoral research broadly centers on the tensions between empirical reality, world-making, and identity formation as part of a critical masculinity studies analysis of cultural productions from the Americas produced by male authors and about men who just so happen to desire homosocial intimacies. That is, he examines both gay (open and not) as well as a broad array of male cultural workers who exist and/or navigate along a complex sexual continuum between 1940 - 2001. His doctoral dissertation, tentatively titled CarnalErotics: The Homosocial Politics, Homoerotic Significations, and Homophobic Resonances of Nationalist Discourses in the Americas, Circa 1960-2001, investigates how this multi-national yet hemispherically conscious archive from Argentina, Chile, Cuba, El Salvador, Haiti, México, and the United States names and subverts the heteropatriarchal symbolic economies of national(ist) literatures. Significantly, while male-male sex is figured as antithetical to the nation-state that is anthropomorphized in the form of a hypermasculine and presumably straight warrior hero and other archetypes, these authors trouble the very basis of the nation-state. Carnalerotics argues that queered ostensibly non-gay and gay male bodies are arrivant states that, too, emerge as legible alongside the rise of the nation-state in the Americas. Like the nation-state, the vexed status of these queered ostensibly non-gay gay male bodies emerge from colonialism and empirically negotiate the quotidian racial, gender, sex, and sexuality hierarchies left by the legacy of Christian, European, and heteropatriarchal coloniality. 

He is the author of “The Rhetorization of the Abject’s Grammatical Positionality” in Critical Insights: Postcolonial Literature (Salem Press, 2017); “The Materialist Conception of Fiction” in Critical Theory and the Humanities in the Age of the Alt-Right (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); and "On Becoming Chicano in Europe: John Rechy’s Immanently Queer Latino Soldado Razo Flâneur in Paris, 1950-52" in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicana/o Studies (Spring 2023). His forthcoming publication is titled “Of Closets, Color, and Coming Out Narratives: Baldwin’s Adumbration of Gay Intersectional Ontologies in Giovanni’s Room” and will be published in The Routledge Companion to James Baldwin, edited by Yasmin Y. DeGout and Tyechia Thompson.
 
Parra is the Assistant Director of the Global Latinidades Center and works closely with Director Olguín to promote research and programming in neglected areas of Latinx Studies in local and global contexts. His Center-wide work includes a grant writing team that secured a $20,000 Social Justice Research Grant for a UCSB partnership with the Immigrant Legal Defense Center (ILDC) whose mission is to provide legal counseling and representation to indigent immigrants facing deportation. In addition to managing the Center's administrative infrastructure, Parra is the Editorial Assistant for a special double-dossier project titled "Global Latinidades" with Aztlán: A Journal of Chicana/o Studies (48.1 Spring 2023 and 48.2 Fall 2023); an anthology project titled, In the Long Run: Luis J. Rodríguez’s Life and Literary Legacy—Essays, Interviews, and Reflections with Selected new Writings by the Author (Edinburgh University Press, 2025); and a multi-volume anthology on Latinx Marxisms co-edited by Jaime Gonzales, Jennifer Ponce de Leon, and Ben Olguín. This work compounds his experience navigating institutions and discursive structures, and undergirds his approach to critical ethnic, gender, and sexuality studies, with a particular interest in critical Latinx masculinity studies through literature, film, and philosophy.