Michael Hames-García
Barbara and Carlisle Moore Distinguished Visiting Professor, University of Oregon and Associate Professor of English, Binghamton University

Michael Hames-García grew up primarily in Oregon, where he also attended college at Willamette University, receiving a B.A. in English. He then moved to New York, earning a Ph.D. in English from Cornell University and taking his first teaching position at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He was granted tenure and promoted to Associate Professor of English at Binghamton in 2004, with joint titles in Comparative Literature and in Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture. He served as director of undergraduate studies for the English Department from 2003-2005. He was also a Hewlett Visiting Fellow at Stanford University's Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (RICSRE) in 2002-2003, and is currently the Moore Distinguished Visiting Professor of English at the University of Oregon.

Hames-García's research has addressed questions emerging from the interdisciplinary areas of U.S. Latina/o studies, critical prison studies, and gay and lesbian studies, although his approach to these questions is primarily informed by methodologies drawn from cultural studies and literary analysis. The ethical core of his work seeks to understand the relations among personal and social identity, varieties of meaning-making, and struggles for social justice.

He has offered graduate and undergraduate courses ranging from "Prison Literature" and "Race, Law, and American Literature" to "Queer Theory and Its Discontents" and "Critical Theories of Race and Sexuality" to "U.S. Latina/o Literature," "Chicana/o Aesthetics and the Novel" to "Latina/o Cultural Studies" and "C.L.R. James and Cultural Studies." Hames-García has also published a number of essays on gay and lesbian studies, the teaching of "American" literature, and writers Gloria Anzaldúa, Oscar Zeta Acosta, and José Martí. He is the author of Fugitive Thought: Prison Movements, Race, and the Meaning of Justice (University of Minnesota Press, 2004). He has also co-edited Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (University of California Press, 2000) and Identity Politics Reconsidered (Palgrave 2006). With Paula Moya and others, he was a founding organizer and coordinating team member of The Future of Minority Studies research project (FMS), an inter-institutional, interdisciplinary, and multigenerational research project facilitating focused and productive discussions about the democratizing role of minority identity and participation in a multicultural society.