Assistant professor Ana-Maurine Lara, women's, gender, and sexuality studies, has received the 2021 Early Career Award from the Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation. The award is UO’s highest honor to recognize and celebrate an emerging and significant record of scholarship and research on our campus.
The VPRI website provides the following details on Lara and the award:
Ana-Maurine Lara has achieved a significant record of outstanding interdisciplinary accomplishments across several fields, including anthropology, literature, performance studies, women and gender studies, digital humanities and indigenous, race and ethnic studies. An innovative scholar, she combines qualitative social science research with the artistic production of fiction, poetry and performance.
Lara engages questions of race, gender and freedom using critical analysis and artistic imagination. Her work is notable in its creativity and breadth in explicating the experiences of Caribbean queer lives and struggles as central to the processes of black freedom. She has published papers in some of the leading journals in her field and across an array of disciplines. Lara’s books have made a major impact in the fields of Black studies, gender and feminist studies, Caribbean studies and anthropology. The digital humanities project she co-authored with Alaí Reyes-Santos, and that they co-created with the Digital Scholarship Center, “Caribbean Women Healers: Decolonizing Knowledge within Afro-Indigenous Traditions,” is part of an innovative form of publishing called “public scholarship.” The site has had more than 4,700 social media hits, 247 website registrants and 78 attendees since launching in April 2020.
“My research and creative work are means of survival in a world brutally opposed to my existence and the existence of others like me. I seek to enable my own and others’ freedom now and into the future. Given the broader social and political context in which my work exists, it moves me, deeply, that my colleagues deem my work worthy of an Outstanding Early Career award. I am completely and happily surprised,” Lara said.
Lara joined the UO in the fall of 2015 after completing her Ph.D. at Yale University. Since joining the UO faculty, she has published two academic monographs, five peer-reviewed articles (one co-authored), a book of poetry and two short stories, a novella and a limited-edition letterpress multi-media artbook. She has also produced two performances and is co-editing two peer-reviewed collections. Her book “Queer Freedom: Black Sovereignty” (SUNY Press) was recently awarded the 2020 Ruth Benedict Prize for Outstanding Monography from the Association for Queer Anthropologists, a section of the American Anthropological Association; her book “Streetwalking: LGBTQ Lives and Protest in the Dominican Republic” (Rutgers University Press) received an Honorable Mention for the Isis Duarte Prize of the Dominican-Haiti section of the Latin American Studies Association, and her poetry book, “Kohnjehr Woman” (Redbone Press, 2017) was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in 2018. In 2019 she received the Oregon Literary Arts Foundation Laurell Swails and Donald Monroe Memorial Fellowship for her novel in progress, “Injured Stone.” In December 2020, Lara was awarded the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art Black Lives Matter grant, supporting the realization of the collaborative work “Sanctuary, a Performance” on May 19, 2021. On June 1, Lara earned a special honor from the Lambda Literary Foundation: the Randall Kenan Prize for Black LGBTQ Fiction.
“Dr. Lara is an innovative and prodigious scholar. Her work is notable because she brings together critical analysis and artistic imagination. She has also developed an impressive corpus of scholarship,” Yamin said. “Her contributions to her field as well as to the UO community should be recognized.