Ph.D., University of California, Davis

Marisol Cortez joined the American Studies faculty at KU this year as a Visiting Assistant Professor and American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow for 2010-2012. She received her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from the University of California, Davis, and her primary research and teaching interests lie in the emerging field of the environmental humanities, which explores the cultural and ideological dimensions of environmental problems, especially as they intersect with social injustices like racism, classism, sexism, and colonialism. More broadly, she also studies U.S. popular culture and the politics of embodiment, with her current book project focused on scatological culture in the context of the environmental justice problems created by water-based disposal technologies like sewers and toilets, whose normalization of cultural disgust for ordinary bodily functioning also institutionalizes "out of sight, out of mind" relationships to waste and its destinations. She has published work on environment and popular culture in Reconstruction and Green Letters, and currently has an essay on obsolescence themes in animated film under review at MIT Press for an anthology entitled Histories of the Dustheap. Prior to joining KU, she worked as the climate justice organizer for the Southwest Workers' Union, a grassroots community organization in her native San Antonio, Texas. Building on this experience, her current research and teaching interests seek to create models for linking academic scholarship on nature and culture across disciplines to broader, on-the-ground movements for social justice and environmental sustainability beyond the walls of the university.

Current Classes:

• AMS 110, American Identities

Classes Taught:

• AMS 110, American Identities
• AMS 344, Social History of the U.S. Horror Film
• AMS 360, American Studies Theory and Method