Maira Álvarez
Maira E. Álvarez, Independent Scholar and Advisor. Adjunct Instructor at St. Mary’s University, Department of History
As a member of the TBDH group, Dr. Álvarez is excited about further developing BAC’s digital archive. This will involve integrating metadata on transborder multilingual archival material such as newspapers, photographs, and maps with the help of museums and libraries, including the El Paso Museum of History, UTSA Library, UTEP Library, Briscoe Center, Texas General Land Office archive, Houston Public Library, Laredo Border Museum, Archivo General del Municipio de Nuevo Laredo, among others. These resources hold transborder material and will contribute to providing resources for research and pedagogical purposes on border and transborder culture, language, and history.
Dr. Álvarez earned a Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies with a certification in Women’s, Gender, and Sexualities Studies from the University of Houston. She is a multilingual fronteriza from the Laredo, TX – Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas border. Her work, broadly speaking, focuses on the interconnections of Latino/a/x/e and Latin American studies and transborder studies addressing systemic racism from a feminist perspective. She utilizes postcolonial and decolonial digital and humanities methodologies to analyze and develop scholarly work, shape course curricula, and promote public initiatives committed to advancing social justice. She is currently working on a co-authored manuscript tentatively titled Borderlands Digital Humanities.
Dr. Álvarez served as a Provost’s Early Career Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin in the History Department from 2022-2024. As an Early Career Fellow in Borderlands History, she co-founded the Borderlands Studies Working Group in the fall of 2022. The group’s purpose was to bring together graduate students, postdocs, and faculty with the support of UT’s Actions that Promote Community Transformation Grant. Additionally, in the spring of 2024, she taught the seminar “Thinking Like a Historian: Borderlands in the Archives,” which focused on multilingual borderland archives. In 2021, Dr. Álvarez was an American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Fellow at Arizona State University, School of International Letters and Cultures. During this time, she taught courses on borderlands’ culture and digital humanities.
Dr. Álvarez has collaborated in creating course curricula with projects such as Crossing Latinidades Race Laws led by Dr. Monica Muñoz Martinez at UT Austin, and Yo soy porque tú eres led by Dr. Carolina Alonso, Fort Lewis College. Additionally, she is a team member of digital humanities projects focused on border and transborder issues such as United Fronteras, Torn Apart/Separados, and co-founded Borderlands Archives Cartography (BAC).
As the former director of the Inter-University Program for Latino Research, a national consortium of twenty-two university-based centers, Dr. Álvarez coordinated all IUPLR-related activities; served as a liaison on events coordination with conference host sites, and worked with the Washington DC director on IUPLR communications and promotions.
Dr. Álvarez’s expertise in border and transborder culture, language, and history helps in developing and leading course curricula, projects, and research for the Transborder Digital Humanities Group. Additionally, her extensive collaborations and leadership skills can aid in establishing and enhancing partnerships with organizations in the US and Latin America.