Congratulations to ALS PhD student Laurie Lowrance, who has accepted a full-time faculty member position at Cisco College in west Texas, starting Spring 2021. Located near Abilene, Cisco College is a community college that serves a diverse student population from the surrounding communities and region and offers associate degrees, access to academic courses for transfer to four-year universities, career and technical education, and workforce training. Since 1940, the college has been an integral part of higher and continuing education opportunities in the region and beyond.
It’s a home-coming of sorts for Laurie, who grew up near the college and still has strong familial ties to the region. She looks forward to taking the knowledge and skills she acquired at UNM back to her home community and helping more rural and non-traditional students access quality educational opportunities.
Laurie is currently a Center for Regional Studies fellow and is completing her dissertation on the contested spaces of domesticity in the Southwest. Laurie’s dissertation theorizes that, while works by Mexican American and Native American women writers often use the mid-nineteenth century and the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to document continued loss of culture and to fight for a more accurate and complete historical record, their works often also document the creation and re-creation of hybrid forms of domesticity specific to the Southwest. These “regional domesticities,” as Laurie calls them, serve as specific forms of domesticity that assert the vital importance of studying domesticity, decoloniality, gender roles, folklore, historical romance, regionalism, settler colonialism, and the West and Southwest. Dr. Jesse Alemán directs her dissertation.
