Diaz, Ella Maria
Professor, Chicana and Chicano Studies Department
*2022--2025, Dept. Chair
Preferred: ella.diaz@sjsu.edu
Education
Ph.D. College of William and Mary, American Studies, 2010
Dissertation: 鈥淔lying Under the Radar with the Royal Chicano Air Force: The Ongoing
Politics of Space & Ethnic Identity鈥� *** Distinguished Dissertation Award, 2010***
M.A. College of William and Mary, American Studies, 2002
MA Thesis: 鈥�1500 by 1939 by 1998鈥擳hese are the Measurements of Malinche鈥檚 Body: An
Analysis and Review of Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Nationality鈥�
B.A. University of California, Santa Cruz, American Literature, 1999
Bio
Dr. Ella Maria Diaz began her academic career as a lecturer (adjunct faculty) at the San Francisco Art Institute (2006鈥�2012) in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies. Teaching courses for the Urban Studies program, Diaz also taught writing courses for SFAI鈥檚 undergraduate and graduate programs. In 2012, Dr. Diaz joined the Department of Literatures in English and the Latina/o Studies Program at Cornell University, earning tenure in 2017. She concluded her term as an Associate Professor at Cornell in 2022, before joining the Chicana and Chicano Studies Department at San Jos茅 State University as Professor and Chair.
Diaz鈥檚 first book Flying Under the Radar with the Royal Chicano Air Force: Mapping a Chicano/a Art History (2017) explores the art, poetry, performance, and political activism of a vanguard Chicano/a art collective founded in Sacramento, California, during the U.S. civil rights era. For this work, Diaz won the 2019 Book Award for the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Association (NACCS).
Diaz鈥檚 second book, published in 2020, is a primer on Chicano artist Jos茅 Montoya and volume 12 of the UCLA and Chicano Studies Research Center鈥檚 A Ver series. It received a Gold Medal for Best Arts Book and a Gold Medal for Best Biography in 2020 from the International Latino Book Awards.
Diaz has published in several anthologies including Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chican@/Latin@ Young Adult Literature (2020), which won the Edited Book Award from the Children鈥檚 Literature Association in 2022. Her 2013 essay, 鈥淭he Necessary Theater of the Royal Chicano Air Force,鈥� published in Aztl谩n: A Journal of Chicano Studies, was anthologized in 2016 with The Chicano Studies Reader: An Anthology of Aztl谩n, 1970-2016. Diaz also has articles in English Language Notes (ELN), ASAP Journal, and Chicana-Latina Studies Journal.
Professor Diaz serves on the Editorial Board of Aztl谩n: A Journal of Chicano Studies (UCLA); and is on a National Advisory Council Member for . Partnership of the University of Minnesota, the National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago, The University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, 2018鈥攑resent.
Current research projects include a post-script to her 2020 A Ver volume on Jos茅 Montoya; it comprises a collection of interrelated essays on the canonical Chicano artist鈥檚 early poetry publications as they鈥檝e become available online, through the digitization of his major library collection and related ones. Exploring the implications of the digital humanities for vanguard Chicana/o artists in the United States, Diaz reveals the intellectual damage and cultural loss resultant from the erasures of these artists in the national canons and U.S. institutions. She does so by drawing on western theories of archives鈥攆rom Michel Foucault (ca 1970s) to Jacques Derrida (1995)鈥攁s well as contemporary Chicana interventions by scholar Karen Mary Davalos in Chicana/o Remix: Art and Errata Since the Sixties (NYU 2018), Mar铆a Cotera鈥檚 essay, 鈥溾�業nvisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster鈥�: Feminist Archival Praxis after the Digital Turn鈥� (2015), and Cotera's co-edited anthology Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era (2018).
Diaz鈥檚 other research projects involve exhibition reviews of major Chicana/o and U.S. Latinx art shows, as well as her visual and cultural analyses of testimonio as an art of the Americas. As a narrative 鈥済enre,鈥� testimonio takes many forms that reflect the convergence of several systems of knowledge, following fifteenth and sixteenth-century European conquests of Indigenous American societies; the multiple modes of testimonio, or telling stories of whole communities, continue to expose historical forces of power beyond the control of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities of the Americas.