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Assistant Professor
Pauli Murray 568
Raquel.Escobar@unc.edu

Education

BA University of Texas San Antonio, 2011
MA University of Illinois, 2017
PhD University of Illinois, 2020

Research Interests

Raquel Escobar is a historian of 20th-century race, Indigeneity, and political and intellectual history in the Americas. Broadly, Escobar is interested in examining the politics of Indigeneity in the Americas during the 20th century. Escobar is currently working on her first book, tentatively titled Indigenous Diplomacies. The manuscript examines transnational Indigenous politics, diplomacy, and shifting twentieth-century racial scripts. Utilizing the Inter-American Indian Institute and the transnational political and intellectual networks that animated it, her work highlights how Indigenous people negotiated and utilized Inter-American state programs and examines the impact of US-sponsored institutions and research across the US/Mexico borderlands and throughout Latin America. In doing so, Escobar highlights Indigenous intellectuals, politicians, artists, and boarding school youth who demonstrate their continued ties and investment in community-specific notions of kinship, diplomacy, and autonomy.

Escobar earned her PhD in History with a minor in American Indian and Indigenous Studies from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Prior to joining UNC, Escobar was a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow for the Humanities Action Lab (HAL) at Rutgers University- Newark (2020-22) where she oversaw HAL’s COVID-19 Mass Listening project and a new Mellon funded fellowship program, which aims to foster leadership from Minority Serving Institutions and frontline communities to use public humanities for climate justice.

Some Notable Publications

Raquel Escobar and Wilmarie Medina-Cortes, “Climates of Inequality: Community Co-Curation and Action Oriented Public Humanities at Minority Serving Institutions” in The Routledge Companion to Public Humanities Scholarship (2024), pp. 267-278.

Theresa Rocha Beardall and Raquel Escobar, “What Then Remains of the Sovereignty of the Indians? The Significance of Social Closure and Ambivalence in Dollar General v. Mississippi Choctaw,” The Indigenous Peoples’ Journal of Law, Culture, and Resistance 3, no. 1 (2016): 3-38.

Graduate Students

This faculty member is not accepting graduate students for the 2024-2025 application cycle.