Karina Vado

Karina Vado

Karina A. Vado (she/her/ella) received her Ph.D. in English and a Graduate Certificate in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from the University of Florida. Her research interests span the fields of Hemispheric American Studies (esp. Afro-Latinx, Latin/x American, and African American Literary and Cultural Studies), Critical Race and Feminist Science and Technology Studies, and Science Fiction and Utopian Studies. Dr. Vado’s scholarship has been generously supported by several competitively awarded fellowships including the Florida Education Fund’s McKnight Doctoral Fellowship, the University of Texas at Austin’s Gloria E. Anzaldúa Summer Research Fellowship, Penn State University’s Diversity Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, and the University of Florida’s O. Ruth McQuown Graduate Award.

Her work in progress, Latinx DNA: Race, Latinidad, and the Gene(ome), interrogates the various genetic fictions (re)produced by popular scientific and cultural (mis)understandings of Latinidad, ones that render the Latinx body a living archeological site that is biologically seductive for its always assumed synthesis of African, Indigenous, and European ancestries (or, what she calls the “myth of Latinx genomic exceptionalism”). Situating these contemporary discourses of “positive mixture” within a long and fraught history of Latin American and Caribbean cultural and scientific approaches to race, racialization, and mixedness, Latinx DNA explores how Latinx cultural workers are ingeniously responding to and challenging reductive interpretations of the gene(ome) in ways that seek to re-tell the hemispheric histories—and continuing presence—of Latinx communities across space and time.

You can find samples of Dr. Vado’s scholarship in edited collections such as Race and Utopian Desire in American Literature and Society and in Human Contradictions in Octavia Butler’s Work (Palgrave). You can also find samples of her editorial work in Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, the flagship journal of the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association.

For more on recent research projects and opportunities for collaboration, visit vadokarina.com

CV