René Esparza researches the racial and sexual politics of neoliberal urban social formations, particularly as these processes determine unequal health outcomes.
Esparza is the author of the upcoming manuscript From Vice to Nice: Race, Sex, and the Gentrification of AIDS, which identifies the spatial determinants of health in the differential allocation of HIV precarity. His second major project surveys the transnational nature of Latinx AIDS activism, comparing how the politics of racialization and the protracted inequalities of US citizenship, colonial statecraft, and immigration law have shaped Latinx experiences and responses to the AIDS pandemic. He is published in the Journal of African American History, Feminist Formations, and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. As an interdisciplinary queer of color historian, Professor Esparza teaches courses in women of color feminism and queer of color critique. He holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
