This profile was current as of 2020 when she was a part of the Kellogg community.
Sarah Quesada is an assistant professor of English and a faculty affiliate at the Institute for Latino Studies. Her research and teaching interests include 20th and 21st century Latinx and Latin American literatures, Francophone West African literature, decolonial and spatial theory, and heritage tourism of the African diaspora.
Quesada is currently working on a book, titled Atlantic Borderlands: UNESCO Slave Routes, Textual Memorials, and Fictions of a Latinx-Atlantic, which explores the relevance of Atlantic African historiography to Latinx identity. The project explores the uneven distribution of slave trade memory across the Atlantic by drawing comparisons between West African heritage sites and Latin American and Latinx storytelling.
Additionally, her research is devoted to the interdisciplinary training of scholars and advocates for the empirical integration of fieldwork and archival research to the study of literature, as well as the comparative study of literatures and texts in Spanish, English, French and Portuguese. She describes a portion of this praxis in her contribution to the Oxford Handbook of Latino Studies (Oxford University Press, 2020).
Quesada is a former postdoctoral associate in the department of Latina/Latino studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and an American Council of Learned Societies Andrew Mellon fellow. She holds an MA from the University of Georgia and a PhD from Stanford University.