Position Title
Assistant Professor
- Chicana/o Studies
Education
Ph.D. Ethnic Studies 2008, University of California, San Diego
M.A. Ethnic Studies 2000, University of California, San Diego
B.A. Interdisciplinary Studies 1996, University of California, Berkeley
Research Areas and Interests
Research Areas and Interests
Ofelia Ortiz Cuevas is an interdisciplinary scholar in the Department of Chicana/o Studies at UC Davis. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego. Her research is at the intersections of Critical Race Studies, Visual and Cultural studies, and Geography and Law and focuses on race, prisons, and policing. Her work questions the ethical value of the lives of people of color and the contemporary value embedded in the practice of racial violence.
She is a past UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow and has taught extensively in the UC system. Her current manuscript, Visualities of Violence: Witnessing the Policing of Race, will be published by Temple University Press 2023 and examines the historical continuities and discontinuities of policing and racial violence on the material and discursive terrains of law, visual cultural productions, and colonial capitalism. Her work on state violence and incarceration has been published in journals like American Quarterly, PUBLIC, and edited books such as Black and Brown Los Angeles: A Contemporary Reader (UC Press).
Ortiz-Cuevas is currently directing a California-focused campus-wide initiative at UC Davis for formerly incarcerated and system-impacted students. She is also the recipient of a UCOP Multicampus Research Grant which will excavate the historical connections of The Organization of Solidarity of the People of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (OSPAAAL) political print art with political print art in California and the West. Lastly, she is working on her second book titled, A Consideration of the West: California and the Geo-Historical Shift of the US.
Selected Publications
“Race, the Citizen and the LA (non)Human: State Violence and Race Relations in Globalized Los Angeles” in Black and Brown Los Angeles: A Contemporary Reader. Josh Kun and Laura Pulido eds. Berkeley. University of California Press. 2013.
“Welcome to my Cell: Housing and Race in the Mirror of American Democracy” American Quarterly, Vol. 64 No. 3, September 2012.
“COPS and the Visual Economy of Punishment” in Abolition Now! Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison Industrial Complex. Oakland. AK Press. 2008.