The Institute for Citizens & Scholars, funded by the Mellon Foundation, has named Willamette University Assistant Professor of English Teresa Hernández as one of 10 Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders for 2025. The national award supports exceptional junior faculty who are poised to make a difference in their field, university community, and the world.
Hernández joined Willamette in 2022 as Assistant Professor of English and as affiliate faculty in the programs of Ethnic Studies and Women's and Gender Studies. A border scholar from the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas, her research and teaching are situated at the intersections of Latinx literary and cultural studies and border theory — more specifically, her work considers the geopolitics of citizenship, subjectivity, and narrativity within Latinidad.
Her scholarly work has appeared in MELUS, the New Mexico Historical Review, and in the first critical collection on the life and work of Sandra Cisneros, ¡Ay Tú!, through the University of Texas Press. Her most recent article, “On Necropolitics and the Precarious Border Subject,” is forthcoming in Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures. In 2024, Hernández was awarded the Renjen Prize for Faculty Excellence, Willamette University’s recognition of early career faculty.
“It’s an incredible honor to be nationally recognized for my dedication to community-centered research and inclusive teaching,” Hernández said. “The award period overlaps with my pre-tenure research leave, which will allow me to utilize this time and additional funding to visit critical sites across the Texas-Mexico border that pertain to my research on environmental precarity. I’m excited for how these experiences, discussions, and research will shape and reshape future Willamette English and Ethnic Studies courses when I return in Spring 2026.”
The research award will support Hernández on her current project titled, “Endangered Border Subjects: Eco-Nationalism and The Crisis of Citizenship,” which grapples with the biopolitical states of environmentalisms, identity, narrative, and immigration across border spaces from South Texas to the Pacific Northwest.
