Professor of American Studies and Director of Undergraduate Studies

Education: AMST Yale University, Ph.D., 2000
Professional Website

Research Interest

Visual Culture Studies, Migration in the Americas, Cultural Studies

Rebecca M. Schreiber is a Professor in the American Studies Department at University of New Mexico and holds affiliations with the Latin American Iberian Institute, the Feminist Research Institute, and the Southwest Hispanic Research Institute. Her research focuses on 20^th and 21^st century migration between Central America, Mexico and the U.S. through the lens of visual culture. Her first book, Cold War Exiles in Mexico: U.S. Dissidents and the Culture of Critical Resistance (2008), is a study of the ways that cultural ideas and aesthetic practices travel across national borders, challenging the binary, nation-based frames of seeing and analyzing post-World War II visual art, film, and literature in the U.S. and Mexico. Her second book, The Undocumented Everyday: Migrant Lives and the Politics of Visibility (2018), which received the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism (2019), examines the relationship between documentary aesthetics, Mexican and Central American migration to the U.S. and U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and im/migrant social movements. She also co-edited an issue of Radical History Review on “Radical Histories of Sanctuary” with A. Naomi Paik and Jason Ruiz (October 2019).  

Her current book project, Visualizing Displacement: Artists, Accompaniment, and Migration in the Americas, analyzes artworks created collaboratively by U.S., Mexican, Salvadoran, and Indigenous artists with migrants from Central America and Haiti. In 2021 she received The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant to support research and writing on this project. Related to this project she published “Performing Sanctuary” in Migration and Society: Advances in Research (2021); “The Work of Arte Urgente: Performative Acts of Political and Artistic Imagination” in Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture (2022); and “Visions of Refuge: The Central American Exodus and the Floating Ladder” in a special issue of American Literary History on “Exiles, Migrants, and Refugees” (2022).

She is currently a Co-PI with Professors Catherine Ramirez and Jonathan X. Inda on “Bioprecarity: Latinx Migrants, Captivity, and Resistance,” Crossing Latinidades Collaborative, Cross-Institutional, and Comparative Research Working Groups and Latino Humanities Studies Grant, sponsored by the Mellon Foundation (2022-2024).