Global Latinidades Center's Assistant Director, Michael Andrew Parra, wins $33,000 Crossing Latinidades Mellon Humanities Fellowship

The Assistant Director of the Global Latinidades Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Michael Andre Parra, is named one of the 2024-25 Crossing Latindades Mellon Humanities Fellows, funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, for his dissertation project titled, Carnalerotics: The Homosocial Politics, Homoerotic Significations, and Homophobic Resonances in Nationalist Discourses of the Americas, circa 1960-2000. In a cohort of 31, he is one of two doctoral students vetted by the Chicano Studies Institute to represent UC Santa Barbara as a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) committed to supporting the next generation of US Latinx Studies scholars. This initiative is housed at the University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC), and was made possible by the hard work of co-Principal Investigators (PIs) Dr. Amalia Pallares and Dr. María de los Ángeles Torres.

His doctoral research broadly centers on the tensions between empirical reality, world-making, and identity formation in Chicano, Latino, and Latin American literary and cultural studies. As part of a critical masculinity studies analysis, he examines both gay (open and not) as well as a broad array of male cultural workers from the Americas who exist and/or navigate along a complex sexual continuum. From the postwar period to the turn of the 21st Century, he forges a multi-national yet hemispherically conscious archive from Argentina, Chile, Cuba, El Salvador, Haiti, México, and the United States that names and subverts the heteropatriarchal symbolic economies of national(ist) literature. To explore how these cultural producers engage in nationalistic discourses as intellectuals, writers, and social beings in a dialectical relationship with a respective nation-state(s), this project is guided by two overarching inquiries. The first question is how do these cis-male authors use literature as an apparatus to document lived male sexuality and engage a national imaginary. The second interrogation investigates how literature as escrevivências (that is, written lived experience) of unseen flesh of desires, intimacies, and erotic powers of male sexuality destabilize the status of the nation-state.

Michael has been paired with UC Santa Barbara Chicana/o Studies Professor, Dr. Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval, in the mentorship program of the Crossing Latinidades Mellon Humanities Fellowship. Through this mentor-mentee pairing, he is a Research Fellow on Dr. Armbruster-Sandoval's book project on  Radical Movements in Los Angeles in the 1980s, and projects that intersect with the UCSB Labor Center. Working with Dr. Armbruster-Sandoval grounds a traditional English dissertation within the humanities-inflected social sciences frameworks by analyzing the "political inopportunity," "mobilizing structures," and "the framing processes" around the primary authors and novels of Michael's project.