Cathryn Merla-Watson holds a Ph.D. in American Studies with specializations in Women and Gender Studies and Geography from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Literatures and Cultural Studies; affiliate faculty in Mexican American Studies; and Co-Director of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Texas-Río Grande Valley. Her research interests broadly include Latinx studies, Latinx speculative aesthetics, queer theory, performance studies; Chicana and Latina feminisms, and social justice research methodologies. She has published articles in Aztlán and MELUS and has published chapters in The Un/Making of Latina/o Citizenship; Culture, Politics, and Aesthetics (2014); Research Justice: Methodologies for Social Change (2015); and Latina Outsiders: Remaking Latina Identity (2019). She published with B.V. Olguín Altermundos: Latin@ Speculative Literature, Film, and Popular Culture (2017) with the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, the first anthology to coalesce scholarship theorizing and codifying this new and emerging field of study. This anthology won The Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award (2018). Her current book manuscript Latinx Eschatologies: Performing Apocalyptic Affect examines how recent queer hemispheric Latinx performances redeploy the post/apocalyptic to dramatize the intersectional lived experience of necropower and enact affective politics.