Rate My Professor Michael Hames-Garcia

Michael Hames-Garcia is a scholar specializing in ethnic studies, with research interests encompassing Black Studies, Chicanx and Latinx Studies, Justice Studies and Incarceration, Critical Prison Studies, and Critical Theory. He served at the University of Oregon from 2005 to 2021 in the Department of Ethnic Studies, later known as Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies. His positions included Professor from 2010 to 2021, Associate Professor from 2006 to 2010, Director of the Ethnic Studies Program from 2006 to 2008, Department Head from 2008 to 2011, Director of the Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality Studies from 2005 to 2011, Director of the Center for the Study of Women in Society from 2014 to 2015, and Faculty Director for the Latinx Academic Residential Community from 2019 to 2020. Earlier in his career, he was Assistant Professor and Associate Professor of English at Binghamton University, State University of New York, from 1998 to 2006, and held visiting appointments such as Barbara and Carlisle Moore Distinguished Visiting Professor of English at the University of Oregon in 2005-2006 and Hewlett Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University in 2002-2003.

Hames-Garcia earned his PhD in English from Cornell University in 1998, with a dissertation titled Justice and the Politics of Freedom: Writings by U.S. Prisoners and Their Advocates, an MA in English from Cornell in 1996, and a BA in English from Willamette University in 1993. His scholarship examines inequalities of race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability in the criminal justice system. Key publications include the single-authored books Fugitive Thought: Prison Movements, Race, and the Meaning of Justice (2004) and Identity Complex: Making the Case for Multiplicity (2011), as well as co-edited volumes such as Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader (2011), which received the Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBT Anthology, Identity Politics Reconsidered (2006), and Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (2000). At the University of Oregon, he received the Thomas F. Herman Faculty Achievement Award for Distinguished Teaching (2020), Rippey Innovative Teaching Awards (2017 and 2018), Martin Luther King, Jr. Award for promoting cultural diversity and racial justice (2011), Fund for Faculty Excellence Award (2013), and other honors including the Visionary Jotería Scholar Award (2019).