Lilia Soto, Ph.D.

Associate Professor
Office: AL-372
Email: [email protected]

Lilia Soto is an associate professor in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies (CCS) at San Diego State University. Prior to joining CCS, she was an associate professor of American Studies and Latina/o Studies at the University of Wyoming (UW) with affiliations in the Gender and Women’s Studies Program, International Studies Program, and Creative Writing. From 2019-2022, Soto served as the Director of the Latina/o Studies Program from 2019-2022 and Associate Director of the School of Culture, Gender, and Social Justice at UW. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2008. From a historical and ethnographic position, her research focuses on comparative/relational race and ethnic studies, transnational migration, identity formation and the interconnectedness of time, place, age, gender and sexuality. Soto’s first book titled, Girlhood in the Borderlands: Mexican Teens Caught in the Crossroads of Migration (New York: New York University Press, 2018), couples the temporalities of migration with age, gender, and sex as intersecting categories of analyses and the bearing these have on the lived experiences of Mexican teenage girls raised in transnational families. She has begun to work on her second research project that centers unlikely characters in four different movements in the Napa Valley narrative. This gendered, raced, and classed account alters official narratives of land, migration, wine, and of climate change. Soto has been the recipient of the NEH Summer Seminar, the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, and the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship.