Michael Parra
Lecturer, Ph.D. Candidate English, Global Studies and Feminist Studies
Pronouns: he/him/his
Areas of Interest
- Global studies
- Feminist studies
Contact Information
- Office: Virtual
- Phone: 805-756-1707
- Email: mparra10@calpoly.edu
About Michael Parra
Michael Andrew Parra is an English Ph.D. candidate with doctoral emphases in Global Studies and Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He completed his B.A. in English (African American Studies minor) at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2012 and obtained an M.A. in English Literature in 2018 from San Francisco State University. His master’s research focused on the relationship fiction has with empirical reality and historical realities, and how that differs from nonfiction, particularly philosophy and law. Understanding that authors organize the disorderly, chaotic world in written form, Parra's thesis project, Breaking Through Ideology: Deconstructing “I” and the “Me” Who is Not “Myself,” is immersed into the fiction/nonfiction binary to address the following question: what is being organized and made orderly in the structure of the narrative form of the novel?
His dissertation research returns Chicanx and Latinx studies to a barrio closet as a locus of enunciation for pursuing Trans-American literary and cultural studies. It focuses on male authors across las Américas who published novels between 1950 and 2001 that breathe life into sensuality and sexuality alongside the constructiveness of “man” (read human) and “manliness” as a nation-state-sponsored project. At the tensions between empirical reality, world-making, and identity formation as part of a critical masculinity studies analysis of cultural productions from the Americas produced by male authors, he draws on Chicanx and Latinx queer signifying and claims to the epistemic center from the margins as the vantage for reassessing what José David Saldívar has called TransAmericanity. In doing so, he invokes José Martí’s “Nuestra América” (1891) by tracing late 20th-century counterimperialisms in Argentina, Chile, Cuba, El Salvador, Haiti, Mexico, and the US that variously contribute toward queered hemispheric imaginings. Significantly, while male-male sex is figured as antithetical to the nation-state that is anthropomorphized in the form of a hypermasculine and presumably straight warrior hero and other archetypes, this archive authors from a variety of sex practices trouble the very basis of the nation-state through the novel as a genre and cultural experience of sensuality in the second half of the 20th Century.
Michael is a 2022 Ford Predoctoral Fellow (funded by the Ford Foundation) and a 2024 Crossing Latinidades Mellon Humanities Fellow (funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation). He has participated in Cornell's School of Criticism & Theory (2022), Harvard's Institute for World Literature (2023), and El Colegio de México's International Summer Program (2024) in Mexico City. At UC Santa Barbara, he is the Assistant Director of the Global Latinidades Center, which is part of a multi-campus research initiative funded by the University of California. Michael is a part-time Lecturer for the Department of Africana Studies at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and for the Department of Ethnic Studies at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. His scholarly work has been published in Critical Insight: Postcolonial Literature (2017), Critical Theory and the Humanities in the Age of the Alt-Right (2019), and Aztlán: A Journal in Chicano Studies (2023), and he has forthcoming projects in The Routledge Companion to James Baldwin, James Baldwin Review, and The Handbook of Body Horror.
Education
- Ph.D. candidate, English with doctoral emphases in Global Studies and Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara (Current)
- M.A., English Literature, San Francisco State University (2018)
- B.A., English (African American Studies minor), University of California, Berkeley (2012)