PhD, 1998
Domino Renee Perez graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1998 with a Ph.D. in English and specializations in film, popular culture, cultural studies, and ethnic American literatures.
She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of English and the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
Dr. Perez has won numerous teaching awards and regularly teaches courses in film, young adult fiction, popular culture, American Literature, and Mexican American literature and culture.
Her book There Was A Woman: La Llorona From Folklore to Popular Culture examines La Llorona, the weeping woman, one of the most famous figures in US/Mexican folklore. Her current book project concerns Mexican American masculinity in television and film. Dr. Perez is also at work on a third project about race and representation in young adult literature and popular film. She has published book chapters and articles on topics ranging from Indigeneity in Mexican American studies to appropriation of cultural beliefs and practices.
Her op-eds and interviews, focusing on race and representation in film, literature, and other media, have appeared in The Washington Post, The Conversation, Huffington Post, TruthOut, The Hill, NBC Latino, Fox News Latino, The Houston Chronicle, and Texas Standard.
Perez has served as the Director for the Center for Mexican American Studies since 2012. She co-founded the new Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin in 2014 and the Latino Research Initiative in 2016.
In 2013-14, Dr. Perez served as Co-Chair for the Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies year-long series on “Reading Race in Literature and Film” that included a screening of Alex and Andrew Smith’s Winter in the Blood (2013) and a panel with producer Sherman Alexie, co-writer Ken White, and stars Chaske Spenser, Julie Gladstone, and Dana Wheeler-Nicholson. The series also featured John Sayles, who screened his film Go For Sisters (2013), which was followed by Dr. Perez’s interview with Sayles and his longtime producer Maggie Renzi.
