Dr. Xiomara Verenice Cervantes-Gómez

[Faculty photo shows a brown Latina woman in neutral makeup with black hair and blonde highlights. It is daylight in the photo, she is wearing a grey knit sweater with her hair partially covering her face, and there is green foliage in the background.]

Dr. Xiomara Verenice Cervantes-Gómez is a transdisciplinary queer and performance theorist, who researches and writes in the interstices between Latin American and U.S. Latinx cultural studies, continental philosophy, performance studies, queer theory, and contemporary literature. Cervantes-Gómez is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese in Latin American Literatures and Cultures and holds faculty affiliations across disciplines including the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Gender and Women's Studies, Latina/Latino Studies, Religion, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. She earned her Ph.D. in Spanish and Latin American Studies in the Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture Doctoral Program at the University of Southern California. She also holds a master's degree in Religions of the Americas and Theology from Harvard Divinity School and a B.A. from the University of California, Riverside. Prior to the University of Illinois, Cervantes-Gómez held both predoctoral and postdoctoral positions at Harvard University and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Cervantes-Gómez's contributions to the disciplines has included recently serving on the editorial board of Women & Language, as co-chair of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Sexualities Studies Section, and holding leadership positions at the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA). She currently serves on the executive committee of The Mexican Forum of the Modern Languages Association (MLA).