Casillas, Dolores Inés

Dolores Inés Casillas

Santa Barbara, California, United States

Professor, Chicana and Chicano Studies; Director, Chicano Studies Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara

Biography

Dolores Inés Casillas is Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies and Director of the Chicano Studies Institute (CSI) at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses primarily on immigrant engagement with U.S. Spanish-language and bilingual media and the representation of accented Spanish and English languages within popular culture. She is the author of Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-language Radio and Public Advocacy (NYU Press, 2014), which received two book prizes, and co-editor with María Elena Cepeda (Williams College) of the Companion to Latina/o Media Studies (Routledge Press, 2016) and co-editor with Mary Bucholtz and Jin Sook Lee (UC Santa Barbara) of Feeling It: Language, Race and Affect in Latinx Youth Learning (Routledge Press, 2018). Her current manuscript explores the politics of language learning and language play as heard through different media technologies.

Scholarly beginnings

A research idea

Envisioning possible futures in the field of communication and media studies

Learn more about Prof. Casillas’ journey

Selected readings

•Dolores Inés Casillas. “Speaking Mexican and the Use of Mock Spanish in Children’s Literature or Do Not Read Skippyjon Jones.” In Sounding Out! The Sound Studies Academic Blog. (May 21 2014). *Top 5 most read essays on SO! [ISSN 2333-0309, Indexed by the Modern Language Association’s Bibliography]

• Dolores Inés Casillas. Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-language Radio and Public Advocacy. New York: New York University Press, 2014.

• Mary Bucholtz, Dolores Inés Casillas, and Jin Sook Lee. «Language and Culture as Sustenance.» In Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Educational Justice in a Changing World, edited by Django Paris and H. Samy Alim, 43-59. New York: Teachers College Press, 2017.

• Dolores Inés Casillas, Juan Sebastian Ferrada, and Sara Hinojos. “Accent on Modern Family: Listening to Representations of the Vocal Latina Body.” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, Vol. 43, No. 1 (Spring 2018): 61-88.

• Dolores Inés Casillas, Sara Veronica Hinojos, and Adanari Zarate. “[Cries in Spanish]: The Memetic Role of Soraya Montenegro in Latina/x Popular Culture.” In Communicative Spaces and Media in Bilingual Contexts: Discourses, Synergies, and Counterflows in Spanish and English, edited by Ana Sánchez-Muñoz and Jessica Retis, 143-158. New York: Routledge Press, 2022.