Amy L. Brandzel

Assistant Professor
American Studies and Women Studies

University of New Mexico

I am an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Women Studies at the University of New Mexico. As an intersectional, interdisciplinary scholar, my scholarship works across the connections and contradictions within feminist, GLBT/queer, postcolonial, and critical race theories on identity, citizenship, law, history, and knowledge production. I utilize discourse and rhetorical analysis, historical analysis, and cultural analysis in order to comb through a variety of archives, especially legal cases, popular media representations, and academic scholarship, in order to tease out the contradictions and anxieties of the various forms of normativities. A central thematic of my scholarship is the examination of the relationship between normative knowledges and normative identities and how these function in law, citizenship, culture, and in academe.

Alongside a number of faculty here at UNM, I am working to build our offerings in postcolonial, feminist and queer studies. Moreover, I work closely with the LGBTQ Resource Center here on campus, and we are currently working to build an LGBTQ Course Guide that will, hopefully, lead the way towards the formation of a Queer Studies minor. I also work with a number of graduate and undergraduate students interested in these fields, as well as students that are invested in questioning and dismantling gender, sexuality, nationalisms, citizenship, normative knowledges and identity formations.

I was trained as an interdisciplinary scholar at the University of Minnesota in their Feminist Studies Phd. Program, and was part of their second class of students in the PhD program I was lucky enough to forge a somewhat unusual path by having three co-advisors: Jigna Desai and Richa Nagar (both in the Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies Department), and Barbara Welke (History Department). I continue to benefit from their guidance and intellectual energies, and have had the pleasure of formulating a collaborative relationship with Jigna Desai. I can only hope to follow their lead, and forge similar relationships that can inspire and challenge my own advisees the way my advisors challenge(d) and inspire(d) me.

Please see my curriculum vitae and other pages for more information on my research, publications, teaching, amazing graduate students, and recommended links on radical queer and decolonial projects.

My contact information is at the bottom of the page.