Paula M. L. Moya

Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor of the Humanities and Professor, by courtesy, of Iberian and Latin American Cultures
Ph.D., Cornell University (1998)
M.A., Cornell University (1995)
B.A., University of Houston (1991)
Paula Moya
Department:
English
Moya is currently the Faculty Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE).

She is the author of The Social Imperative: Race, Close Reading, and Contemporary Literary Criticism (Stanford UP 2016) and Learning From Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles (UC Press 2002). She has co-edited three collections of original essays including Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century (W.W. Norton, Inc. 2010), Identity Politics Reconsidered (Palgrave 2006) and Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (UC Press 2000). 

Her teaching and research focus on twentieth-century and early twenty-first century literary studies, feminist theory, critical theory, narrative theory, speculative fiction, interdisciplinary approaches to race and ethnicity, and Chicano/a and U.S. Latina/o studies.

At Stanford, Moya has served as the Director of the Research Institute of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), Director of the Program of Modern Thought and Literature (MTL), Vice Chair of the Department of English, and the Director of the Undergraduate Program of CCSRE. She has been the faculty coordinator of several faculty-graduate student research networks sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, the Research Institute for the Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and Modern Thought and Literature. They include The Interdisciplinary Working Group in Critical Theory (2015-2016, 2012-2014), Feminist Theory (2007-08, 2002-03), Americanity / Coloniality / Modernity (2006-07), and How Do Identities Matter? (2003-06).

Moya is a co-PI of the Stanford Catalyst Motivating Mobility project, and team leader of the Perfecto Project, a fitness tracking app that combines narrative theory, social psychology, and UI/UX research to leverage culturally-specific narratives and artwork to encourage positive behavior change and healthier living in middle-aged and elderly Latinx populations. She was also 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.

Moya has been a recipient of the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, a Ford Foundation postdoctoral fellowship, and an Outstanding Chicana/o Faculty Member award. She has been a Brown Faculty Fellow, a Clayman Institute Fellow, a CCSRE Faculty Research Fellow, and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

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