Leticia Alvarado is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies in the Department of American Studies at Brown University. Alvarado’s interdisciplinary research is situated at the nexus of Latina/o/x, visual culture, and gender and sexuality studies. Her first book, Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production (Duke University Press 2018), offers an account of cultural producers who shunned the standards of respectability used to conjure concrete minority identities by the most widely recognized political actors within Latino activist communities since the 1970s. Abject Performances instead considers concurrent irreverent, disruptive aesthetic strategies—capturing experiences that lie at the edge of mainstream, inspirational Latino-centered social justice struggles—to offer us alternate visions of community formation, affiliation, and coalitional possibility. Alvarado’s research has been funded by the Ford Foundation, the Smithsonian, the American Association of University Women, and Brown University’s Henry Wriston and Pembroke Faculty Fellowships. Her scholarly publications appear in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, and the Journal Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture as well as the award winning museum catalogue, Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A..