Brenda Lara, Ph.D.

Office: AL-355
Email: [email protected]

Brenda Lara (she/they) is an interdisciplinary theorist whose work intersects Chicana Feminism and hauntology— a framework that analyzes repressed histories through the supernatural—to research queer Latinx communities. Her research interests include LGBTQ+ archives, Latinx folklore and horror, and Chicana feminist literature and theory. Lara’s first book project, "Latinx Hauntings," deconstructs the cycle of queer Latinx scholars’ untimely deaths and legacies in academia. She has been awarded the Inter-University Program for Latino Research Mellon Fellowship and currently serves as a board member for the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies. Lara has published work in the award-winning collection Monsters & Saints (2024), Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, and Camino Real: Estudios de las Hispanidades Norteamericanas.

Before arriving at SDSU, she was a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Santa Cruz’s Literature Department. Brenda Lara earned her doctoral degree from UCLA’s Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies with an emphasis in Gender Studies and Experimental Critical Theory and holds a B.A. in Philosophy from UCLA.