Overview
Claudia Milian, a theorist of LatinX contemporaneity, joined the faculty in 2006. She is the author of LatinX (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) and Latining America: Black-Brown Passages and the Coloring of Latina/o Studies (University of Georgia Press, 2013). Her ongoing research interests concentrate on literary and cultural studies; the global south and southern imaginaries; global LatinX studies; transatlantic LatinX studies; LatinX Spain; US Central American studies; migration; citizenship; and environmental humanities.
She is completing her third monograph, entitled “The X Catalogue: Notes on Madrid’s LatinX Flora and Fauna.” Milian scrutinizes the different realms of LatinX human and more-than-human domains of activity in the Spanish capital: botanical life, perennial plants, and “invasive” avian species. The study takes note of how the materialities of the past, vis-à-vis Spain’s “Golden Age,” resonate in the present day. With this book, Milian asks: How do “things” travel? With whom––or with what––have they been moved around? What makes up LatinX and how do the human and the human-like connect as living entities? “The X Catalogue” scrutinizes how curios with a troubling provenance from the “new” world have been deracinated, devalued, and stripped of “cosmic-sized” universality.
Milian has published numerous journal articles and book chapters on LatinX creative practices and sociality; deracination, migration, and transnationalism; and cultural studies in venues such as: Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies; English Language Notes; The Cambridge History of Latina/o American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018); Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination (Duke University Press, 2016); The Cambridge Companion to Latina/o American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2016); Keywords for Southern Studies (University of Georgia Press, 2016); Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies; The C.L.R. James Journal: A Publication of the Caribbean Philosophical Association; LASA Forum; A Companion to African American Studies (Blackwell Publishers, 2006); The Latin American Fashion Reader (Berg Publishers, 2005); A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies (Blackwell Publishers, 2002); Studies in Latin American Popular Culture; Nepantla: Views from South; and Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters.
Her most recent collaborative endeavor is the co-edited collection LatinX: lxs nuevxs castizxs/LatinX: The New Castizxs, published by La Parcería Edita/YoSoyElOtro in Madrid in 2024. She is the editor of two special issues of Cultural Dynamics centered on “LatinX Studies: Variations and Velocities” (February–May 2019) and “Theorizing LatinX” (August 2017). Milian is co-editor, as well, of the special volumes “Transatlantic LatinX Studies, Iberian Studies, and The Global South” for Cultural Dynamics (February–May 2024); “US Central Americans: Representations, Agency, and Communities” for Latino Studies (Summer 2013); and “Interoceanic Diasporas and The Panama Canal’s Centennial” for The Global South (Fall 2012).
She is an Associate Editor at Cultural Dynamics and a member of the Advisory Board at The Global Latinidades Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Milian has served on the Editorial Advisory Board of Duke University Press, has lectured widely, delivered keynote addresses, and taught seminars at the University of Bologna, University of Coimbra, Durham University, and the University of Colorado Boulder.