Javier Duran

Javier Duran (PhD) is Professor of Latin-American and Border Studies at the Center for Latin American Studies and the founding director of the Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry at the University of Arizona. He is a specialist in cultural and interdisciplinary studies along the U.S.-Mexico border and a native of the Arizona-Sonora desert region. Dr. Duran’s areas of teaching and research include U.S.-Mexico border studies, Latin American Cultural Studies, Mexican women’s literature and culture, and Chicana/Chicano-Latina/Latino narrative. He is the author of the book José Revueltas. Una poética de la disidencia, published by the Universidad Veracruzana in Mexico, five co-edited books on Cultural Studies, and numerous articles on literary and cultural themes.

Dr. Duran has taught at Michigan State University, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and he has been a Visiting Research Fellow at the Colegio de Sonora in Hermosillo, Mexico, as well as Visiting Teaching Fellow at the Universidad Veracruzana in Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico. He holds memberships in the Latin American Studies Association, Modern Language Association where he was one of the founding members of the MLA Discussion Group on Mexican Cultural and Literary Studies. Duran is past President of the Association for Borderland Studies (ABS), the leading international organization on the study of border issues; and past Co-President of the Consortium for Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI). He was also recently appointed by the Governor of Arizona to serve on the Board of Directors of the Arizona-Mexico Commission, a binational advocacy organization.

Dr. Duran is currently working on projects dealing with US-Mexico interdisciplinary transborder collaborations, border culture, necro-politics, human security, migrancy, checkpoints, cultural place-making and Indigenous Humanities. He has also investigated and taught about the connections between globalization, transnational identities, and the Mexican and Latin American Diasporas. He is the principal investigator of the University of Arizona based projects: “Fronteridades: Nurturing Collaborative Intersections in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands” funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Co-PI of the “Reclaiming the Border Narrative Archive” funded by the Ford Foundation.