Faculty Member, Ethnic and Religious Studies
Associate Professor/Co-Coordinator, Program in Gender Studies
College of Arts and Sciences
About
Aureliano Maria DeSoto was born and raised in Los Angeles and is a graduate of its K-12 public schools. He attended Yale University and earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1990, with a major in Art and a focus on Printmaking.
DeSoto completed his graduate studies in the Department of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he received his MA (1998) and PhD (2000). Areas of course study included semiotics and literary theory, film theory and analysis, historiography, post-structuralism, cultural theory, and racial and ethnic history.
DeSoto’s doctoral thesis examined Chicana and Chicano (Mexican American) intellectuals and their identity formation symbiotically connected to the changes within the university triggered by the social movements of the 1960s and the rise of Chicano and Ethnic Studies and lesbian-feminist and gay critique. He plans to revise this doctoral work for publication over his upcoming sabbatical year (2012-2013).
DeSoto has published writing in the journal MELUS, LGBTQ America Today, the Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States, the Encyclopedia of American Studies, and contributed chapters to the anthologies Teaching Race in the 21st Century (2008), Telling Tongues: New Perspectives on Language, Identity, and Power in America Latina (2007), and Multiethnic Literature and Canon Debates (2006).
Flowing from these research foci, DeSoto’s teaching is informed and sustained by critically engaging concepts of identity, politics, and society by grounding such studies in the classroom in an interdisciplinary methodology that combines several disciplinary traditions, including history, sociology, literature, film and video, and political science, in crafting a basis for greater intellectual understanding and interlocution.
Previous to joining the faculty of Metropolitan State University, DeSoto served on the teaching faculties of the University of California (Santa Cruz), California State University (Monterey Bay), and Bard College, where he was the Program Director for Studies in Race and Ethnicity. DeSoto was also the Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies at Carleton College (2008-2009), and held a Research Fellowship at the Centre for Canadian Cultural Industries and Institutions at McGill University (1997-1998).
Contact Information
| Address: | Department of Ethnic and Religious Studies |
