Michelle Joffroy

Michelle Joffroy specializes in cultural and literary studies of Latin America and the Latino/a U.S. with an interest in critical digital humanities and cultural production at the intersections of transnational feminist, labor, indigenous and ecological social movements. She has published on a range of topics, including representations of Mexican student movements in literature and film, transborder feminist literature, cultural imaginaries of domestic work in the Americas and multilingual, social justice pedagogies.

Joffroy is currently co-directing a collaborative, community-based digital humanities public history project with the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA). She and Jennifer Guglielmo (history) received a multi-year grant of over $2 million to work with NDWA to develop a multilingual political education curriculum that is rooted in the history of domestic worker organizing and cultural production. With the collaboration of postdoctoral fellow Diana Sierra Becerra, they are creating a digital timeline, a series of documentary videos and workshops to provide workers with access to knowledge about the cultural and organizing histories of domestic workers that they can use as organizing and movement-building tools. Joffroy’s research for the project focuses on the transnational cultural and organizing practices of immigrant domestic workers of the Americas, from the 17th century to the present, to illuminate the multiracial, multilingual and multiethnic imaginations that have shaped domestic worker organizing histories.

Joffroy’s courses prioritize community-based research and learning, and critical digital humanities practices. Her courses include Doméstica: Precarity and the Politics of Intimacy, Zapatismo Now!, Decolonizing Latin American Literary and Cultural Studies, and research seminars on Indigenous women’s environmental and gender movements. Joffroy also offers the first year seminar Tierra y Vida: Latinx Ecological Imagination.