Amrah Salomón J.
Assistant Professor
- Education:
- Ph.D. Ethnic Studies, University of California San Diego
- M.A. Ethnic Studies, University of California San Diego
- B.A. Political Science and English (Creative Writing), San Francisco State University
Amrah Salomón J. is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of California Santa Barbara. Dr. Salomón directs the Regeneración Lab and is a member of the Center for Interdisciplinary Environmental Justice. She is a multi-lingual writer and artist whose work has been published and exhibited in the U.S., Mexico, and U.K.
Her current book project, Confluences: Indigenous border fugitivity, maps histories of Indigenous flight and refusal against pressures from colonialism and carcerality in Yuma, Arizona. This critical-creative project interweaves Leslie Marmon Silko’s novels and Wild West tourism sites like the Yuma Prison Museum, with the understudied archival records and oral histories of non-federally recognized O’odham and Yaqui peoples in Yuma to reveal the untold history of fugitive tribal communities, their resistance to borders and Indian boarding school, and the ways traditional water and desert relations inform fugitivity and border theory.
Amrah Salomón’s research and teaching interests focus on transnational and hemispheric Indigenous Studies, the U.S.-Mexico border and Latin America, Women of Color, Indigenous Feminisms, Queer Theory, Critical Geography, Environmental Humanities, Archives, Memory, Film and Media, Social Movements and Activism. She enjoys critical pedagogy and working with creative writing students.
Dr. Salomón (O’odham, Mexican, and European) is a descendant of the historical O’odham and Yoeme community of the lower Colorado River region. Her research is focused on documenting and preserving the history of her ancestral community. She is also engaged in the following projects:
Indigenous Borderlands: Refusal and Fugitivity
Water Justice + Technology / Water Studio
Reclaiming Homelands: Mapping Indigenous Place Names of North San Diego County, funded by the University of California Critical Mission Studies Initiative.
Research Areas
- c. 1800-1945
- c. 1945-present
- American Literature
- American Race and Ethnic Studies
- Creative Writing and/or Performance
- Environment and Ecocriticism
- Genders and Sexualities
- Global Literatures
- Indigenous and/or Decolonial Studies
- Latinx and/or Chicanx Studies
- Media Studies