María Eugenia López-García
Assistant Professor of Museum and Exhibition Studies
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About
María Eugenia López-Garcia is an Assistant Professor in the Museum and Exhibition Studies program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Previously, she was a 2020-2022 Bridge to the Faculty Postdoctoral Scholar at UIC, and she held a 2019-2020 Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Latina/o Studies at UIUC.
López-García is an interdisciplinary scholar and teacher who studies immigrant and transnational labor, visual culture, comparative racialization, and women-of-color feminisms. In her scholarship, López- García investigates the cultural politics of domestic work, centering on memory, visual activism, and representational justice. Her current research examines visual and performative works by artists and domestic and cultural workers in the Americas as feminist epistemologies that make legible the heterogeneity of subjectivities and social experiences of domestic workers, the multiple forms of violence they endure, and their creative practices of labor dignification. Also, in the research, she examines domestic worker activists’ use of aesthetic and political strategies to create and explore alternative representations of domestic work.
As a public scholar, community organizer, and cultural worker, López-García co-directed a community-based museum for grassroots worker coalition La Mujer Obrera, which displayed the history of resistance and labor displacement of garment workers in El Paso, Texas. In addition, she was a co-curator for Museo Urbano, a public history project of the University of Texas at El Paso History Department, which received the 2013 Outstanding Public History Award from the National Council on Public History. She currently serves as a co-coordinator of the Newberry Library's Seminar in Borderlands and Latino/a Studies
Education
PhD, American Studies, University of New Mexico
M.A., History, The University of Texas at El Paso
B.A., Anthropology, The University of Texas at El Paso