Creative Thought Forum | Women of the Lost Territory: New Mexico Women of the Past, Present, Future with Flannery Burke and Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez

Flannery Burke

Women of the Lost Territory: New Mexico Women of the Past and Present
Flannery Burke and Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez

6:00 p.m. Doors open, reception in lobby
7:00 p.m. Presentation begins in auditorium

Flannery Burke (Associate Professor, Department of History, Saint Louis University) will appear in conversation with Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez (Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; Assocaite Professor of English, Arizona State University) to discuss women in New Mexico history. They will address some of the usual suspects of New Mexico women’s history—Georgia O’Keeffe, Maria Martinez, Nina Otero-Warren—and how their stories may help us to uncover those of lesser-known women whose life histories have been lost in the triple colonization of New Mexico by Spain, Mexico, and the United States.

Flannery Burke, PhD, is an associate professor at Saint Louis University in the Department of American Studies. Her books include A Land Apart: The Southwest and the Nation in the Twentieth Century and From Greenwich Village to Taos: Primitivism and Place at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s. Burke is committed to sharing the indigenous and Spanish-speaking cultures of the American Southwest widely and incorporating those cultures and their histories into the regional, national, and global stories that scholars tell. Her current book project is a history of how twentieth-century writers in the American West imagined the American East.

Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez

Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez, PhD, is an Associate Professor of English and an Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts at Arizona State University. Fonseca-Chávez’s research focuses on the contentions and legacies of colonialism in the southwest U.S. and how Chicanx and Indigenous communities navigate and contest violence and power in literary and cultural production. She is currently working on a project that centers the stories of Hispano residents of eastern Arizona and how they understand and communicate their querencia—a word that invokes a desire (querer) to embody one’s individual and communal heritage/inheritance (herencia). In 2020, she co-edited Querencia: Reflections on the New Mexico Homeland with Levi Romero and Spencer R. Herrera. Querencia was named a finalist for an International Latino Book Award.