Alan Pelaez Lopez

Alan Pelaez Lopez (Ph.D., UC Berkeley) is an Assistant Professor of literature and visual culture in the Department of Chicana/o/x Studies. They specialize in undocumented African and African diasporic migration, performance contracts (legal, philosophical and theatrical), state violence, transgender studies in the Americas and the Antilles, and anti-colonial feminisms.

As a migration studies scholar, Dr. Pelaez Lopez attends to “Black illegalities,” defined as actions Black im/migrants engage to survive and un/perform nonconsensual (labor, social, spiritual, romantic, and national) contracts they are subjugated to in the countries they have migrated to. Such illegalities include the right for Black migrants to seek political asylum in the United States, Mexico, Canada, France, Spain, and Germany; political activism inside immigrant detention centers and in solitary confinement; the commercialized figure of the hard-working migrant as a non-Black migrant; and strict contracts of how a refugee, asylee, or irregular migrant must act in order to obtain conditional visas, residency status, etc.

As a scholar of trans* studies, Dr. Pelaez Lopez change the “queer ethnic studies” minor during their tenure at San Francisco State University to the “queer and trans ethnic studies” minor, marking an institutional political commitment to trans* studies. In 2022, they were awarded a Miriam Jiménez Román Fellowship at New York University where they introduce Afro-Latinx trans* studies at NYU’s The Latinx Project. They are now working on their third manuscript trans*imagination, a critique of “transgender” as a Global North category mobilized by ‘liberal democracies’ to evade accountability to the fact that trans, gender-expansive, two-spirit, and Indigenous peoples account for some of the highest death tolls in prisons, public spaces, reservations, and the U.S.-Mexico, U.S.-Canada, and the U.S.-Caribbean borders.

Dr. Pelaez Lopez is the author of Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien (The Operating System, 2020), a finalist for the International Latino Book Award, to love and mourn in the age of displacement (Nomadic Press, 2020), and the editor of When Language Broke Open: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent (University of Arizona, 2023). 

As a fine arts artist, Dr. Pelaez Lopez’s work lives at the intersection of text-based visuality, paper collage, intervention art, and social practice art. They have showed collages, installations, and traditional visual work in the United States, Germany, and Slovenia; their art pieces have been published in magazines, journals, and anthologies such as HarperCollins’ Somewhere We Are Human and Mexico’s leading arts magazine terremoto. Dr. Pelaez Lopez has been a poet-in-residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora, an art practice fellow at Brown University, and a judge for various art portfolios and poetry manuscripts.

Most recently, Dr. Pelaez Lopez had a solo show at Harvard University’s Art Wing in Winter 2023 and held a 2025 artist residency at SAVVY Contemporary: The Laboratory of Form-Ideas in Berlin, Germany, where they also exhibited work. 

Dr. Pelaez Lopez serves on the editorial board of Intervenxions at NYU’s The Latinx Project.

Published in: Women Studies Quarterly, The Georgia Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, Refinery29, Teen Vogue, Rewire News Group, Splinter News, Best American Experimental Writing, Autostraddle, and others. 

Commentary in: The Architectural Review, The Nation, The Root, Black Agenda Report, and others.

Courses taught at UC Davis: 
CHI 50: Intro to Chicana/o/x Culture  
CHI 155: Chicanx and Latinx Theatre
CHI 161: Queer Latinidad
CHI 198: Afromexican and Afro-Chicanx CultureAfro-Mexican