In her scholarship, Lisa Marie Cacho interrogates the ways in which human value is both ascribed and denied relationally along racial, gendered, sexual, national and spatial lines. Her book, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (NYU Press, 2012) won the American Studies Association’s 2013 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize honoring the most outstanding book published the previous year in American Studies. She is an editor, along with Susan Koshy, Jodi Byrd, and Brian Jefferson, of Colonial Racial Capitalism (Duke 2022). Cacho’s most recent publications can be found in The Boston Review, GLQ, Social Text and American Quarterly. Currently, she is writing a single-authored book examining police killings in the United States.

After receiving her Ph.D. in ethnic studies from the University of California at San Diego, Cacho taught several years for the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign’s Latina/Latino department, where she was a Conrad Humanities Scholar (a distinction bestowed upon outstanding scholars in the humanities). Additionally, she taught incarcerated men at the Danville Correctional Center under the Education Justice Project.

Within the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, Cacho will be teaching interdisciplinary classes in her areas of expertise, which include Latinx studies, comparative race and ethnic studies, criminalization, immigration, women of color feminism, and queer of color critique.