Christopher Perreira

Education

PhD, Literature & Cultural studies, UC San Diego
MA, English, University of Connecticut
BA, Literature, UC San Diego
AA, English, San Diego City College

Biography

Chris Perreira is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego and Associate Editor of the journal American Studies (AMSJ). Before joining Ethnic Studies, he taught in the Department of American Studies at the University of Kansas (2015-2021). Chris grew up in South Bay/Chula Vista, earning his degrees from San Diego City College, UCSD, and the University of Connecticut. In 2017-2018, he was awarded the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship in residence at UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center.

Chris researches and teaches in the areas of culture, race, medicine, and science; Latinx and Chicanx studies; intersections between environmental racism/justice and speculative fiction, art, and thought; and histories and logics of carceral geographies. He has published in the Journal of Transnational American Studies, American Quarterly, Native and Indigenous Studies, American Studies, and English Language Notes. His most recent essays were published in edited volumes Latinx Environmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial (Temple, 2019) and Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (Duke, 2019). His first book, Making Consent: Race, Memory, and Violence in the Medical Archive (Minnesota, forthcoming), examines how narratives of race and criminality are constructed in law, medicine, and public health, arguing that public health representations of race and criminality significantly shape U.S. conceptions of medicine. At the same time, the official narratives making up public health records, medical writing, and ethnographic photography are interrogated, challenged, and reconfigured in cultural production (literature, visual art) over time and across spaces. His in-progress second book, Worlds Away: Environmental Justice and the Production of New Futures, interprets official accounts of neighborhood pollution, industrial toxins, and access to health care against multi-faceted community organizing and cultural representation, with a focus on Latinx writers and artists who center environmental politics in their work.

Research and Teaching Interests

Comparative Ethnic Studies
Transnational American Studies
Race and Medicine
Chicanx-Latinx Studies
Science & Technology Studies
Gender & Sexuality
Speculative Fiction
Environmental Racism/Justice
Decolonial Politics
Prison Abolition & Critical Prison Studies

Selected Publications

Making Consent: Race, Memory, and Violence in the Medical Archive. University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming.

“Consumed by Disease: Medical Archives, Latino Fictions, and Carceral Health Imaginaries.” In Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life, ed. Ruha Benjamin. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.

“Speculative Futurity & the Eco-Cultural Politics of Lunar Braceros: 2125-2148.” In Latinx Environmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial, eds. David J. Vázquez, Sarah D. Wald, and Priscilla Solis Ybarra, Sarah Jaquette Ray. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019.

“Unsettling Archives: Cultures of Carceral States and Settler Logics.” American Quarterly, 70.2 (2018).

“‘Suppose for a moment, that Keanu had reasoned thus’: Contagious Debts and Prisoner-Patient Consent in Nineteenth-Century Hawai‘i.” Journal of Transnational American Studies. 8:1 (2017).