Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Inclusive History Project and the Department of History
she/her/ella
About
Dr. Lorena Chambers is a scholar of cultural, gender, and Latinx history. She studies Mexican and Mexican American performers who experienced international recognition in late nineteenth-century popular culture as a by-product of the emerging cultural diplomacy between the United States and Mexico. Dr. Chambers is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with U-M's Inclusive History Project and is affiliated with the Department of History where she is writing a manuscript based on her dissertation: “From Statecraft to Stagecraft: The Politics of Peddling ‘Mexicanidad’ in U.S. Culture, 1886-1906.”
In 2022, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and the Latino Initiatives Pool funded Dr. Chambers’ digital humanities project titled: The First 100: 50 Years of Chicanas Changing History. To date, she has conducted 14 on-camera oral histories of pioneer Chicana historians who shaped the field of US history intellectually and pedagogically. This archive will be held at the University of Michigan Library. Additionally, in 2021 the Buffalo Bill Center of the West awarded Dr. Chambers a research grant and named her Associate Editor of The Papers of William F. Cody to continue analyzing the role of vaquero and charro performers as cultural diplomats in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Dr. Chambers is a proud first-generation and second-career scholar.
Fields of Study:
- U.S. History, 1865 to present
- Intellectual and Cultural History
- Race and Ethnicity
- Gender Studies and Sexuality
- Politics and Power
- Borderlands History
- Public History
- Visual Culture
Affiliations:
- Faculty Affiliate, Department of History
- Faculty Affiliate and Executive Committee Member, Institute on Research of Women & Gender
