The JHI is pleased to announce our 2025-26 JHI-CDHI Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow—Maira E. Álvarez (PhD Spanish & Hispanic Literatures, University of Houston, 2019). Maira's interdisciplinary work bridges Border Studies, Women’s Studies, Latinx and Latin American Studies, public humanities, heritage language, and Digital Humanities. Her current research examines the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border[lands] through the lens of literary production by fronteriza authors, as well as multilingual archival materials. Maira earned her Ph.D. in U.S. Latino Studies from the University of Houston in 2019, along with a certification in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She held the title of Early Career Provost Postdoctoral Fellow (2022-24) in Borderlands History at the University of Texas at Austin and American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Fellow (2021-22) at Arizona State University. Maira is a co-founder of Borderlands Archives Cartography and a team member of United Fronteras and Torn Apart / Separados.
Fellowship Project
Border[lands] Militarization
This project aims to offer an alternative narrative to the often one-dimensional portrayals of the border as a place of control and surveillance. This research focuses on creating a multilingual metadata framework and a dataset related to border militarization, while also employing digital visualization tools to analyze the evolution of the U.S.-Mexico militarized border over time and space. The project offers a decolonial perspective on the border, viewing it as a dynamic space shaped by both resistance and oppression, where the personal and political intersect in significant ways. It seeks to reclaim histories that have been marginalized or erased by colonial power structures.