Education
Ph.D. English, University of California, Los Angeles, 2011
M.A. English, University of California, Los Angeles, 2006
B.A. English and Chicana/o Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, 1998
Biography
Georgina Guzmán is the daughter of immigrant parents from Jalisco, Mexico. She grew up in Sun Valley, California and went to UCLA, where she obtained her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in English. Before arriving at CSUCI, Dr. Guzmán also taught at UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, and CSULA.
Dr. Guzmán’s research and teaching interests are in Race and Ethnicity, Class, and Workers in 20th and 21st Century American Literature and Society, Community Engagement, Chicana/o-Latina/o Experiences in the US, Chicana Feminist Writers, Affect Studies, Critical Consciousness-Building Pedagogies, Student Development via Service-Learning, First-Generation College Student Success, Autobiography, and Life Writing.
In particular, her research centers on exploring Latinx students’ racial and class shame within educational systems and their desires for middle-class social mobility, as well as their development of a social consciousness and anti-cultural deficit-thinking through their reciprocal relationships to working-class laborers such as domestic workers, farmworkers, campus dining hall workers, and campus custodians.
As a teacher-scholar, she has written on the transformative service-learning experiences that her Chicana/o-Latina/o Literature students shared while reading Latinx Literature books with farmworker families in Oxnard and Camarillo, CA in “Learning to Value Cultural Wealth Through Service Learning: Farmworker Families’ and Latina/o University Students’ Mutual Empowerment via Freirean and Feminist Chicana/o- Latina/o Literature Reading Circles" (Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric, 2019). She examined college student/faculty/administrator and domestic worker relationships in "Healing the Affective Anemia of the University: Middle-class Latina/os, Brown Affect, and the Valorization of Latina Domestic Workers in Pat Mora’s Nepantla Poetry" (Latino Studies, 2017). She also examined first-generation college students’ vital relationships to campus custodians and dining hall workers in Campus Service Workers Supporting First-Generation Students: Cultural Relevancy and Informal Mentorship in Student Success and Retention (with La’Tonya Rease Miles and Stephanie Youngblood; Routledge, 2021). She researched femicides in Mexico in Making a Killing: Femicide, Free Trade, and La Frontera (with Alicia Gaspar de Alba; University of Texas, 2010).
Most recently, she wrote an essay entitled, “Sin Vergüenza Aesthetics: Sandra Cisneros’s Healing from School-inflicted Shame Through Transgressive Literary Styles and Narratives” in ‘¡Ay Tú!’: Critical Essays on The Work and Career of Sandra Cisneros (University of Texas 2023). In it, she examines the ways that racial and class shaming shaped Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros’s life and writing and how she used writing as a healing strategy.
Representative Courses Taught
- ENGL 353 Chicano/a-Latino/a Literature
- ENGL 220 American Literature 1850-present
- ENGL 349 Perspectives in Multicultural Literature
- ENGL 334 Narratives of Southern California
- ENGL 499 English Capstone