Long Biography

Salomé Herrera was born in the Humboldt Park neighborhood of the city of Chicago. She attended a small, local elementary school that emphasized reading and writing, along with an aspirational ethos that influenced ger work ethic and worldview. She later attended a selective enrollment high school on the far north side of the city. Eventually, she left Chicago to attend Cornell University in Ithaca, NY as a first generation college student. In her junior and senior year she was awarded funding from the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) program to conduct research in literary studies. She graduated from Cornell with a BA in English literature and a minor in Latina/o studies after completing his honors thesis on “simulative reading.”

Herrera completed ger PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she studied contemporary TransBorder literature and performance in the department of English. As an interdisciplinary scholar of English, Performance, and Latinx Studies, she studies TransBorder aesthetics in order to address the limitations of identity politics for confronting the violence of the border apparatus, along with media outlets that exploit narratives of migrant trauma. TransBorder art is an experimental form situated between dystopic political realities and a speculative future beyond borders as imagined through queer and trans* modalities.

She also received a graduate certificate in the urban humanities as part of the Urban Humanities Initiative (UHI). In the UHI program she conducted field-work based projects with architects, urban planners, and other humanities scholars in downtown Los Angeles and the city of Shanghai; these experiences had a strong impact on the interdisciplinary nature of her current work. During her candidacy she was awarded a Mellon dissertation completion fellowship from the Inter-University Program for Latino Research (IUPLR), and has served on the Communications Committee for the Latina/o Studies Association.

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