2026-27 Faculty Fellow
About
Anthony Mora's principal research interests focus on the historical construction of race, gender, and sexuality in the U.S. Southwest. His book, Border Dilemmas: Racial and National Uncertainties in New Mexico, 1848–1912 (Duke University Press, 2011), explores how the first generations of Mexicans living in the United States grappled with the racial and national ideologies that circulated along the nineteenth-century border. His current research on the fictional character Zorro considers how the masked hero’s adventures reveal assumptions about Mexican Americans, historical memory, and U.S. regionalism. More broadly, his work considers how stories about the Southwest have shaped competing understandings of citizenship, belonging, and the nation.
During his Eisenberg fellowship, Mora will complete Zorro and the Curse of History. This swashbuckling cultural history follows the masked hero through a century of reinventions, showing how he made American mexicanidad visible, romantic, marketable, and safely contained amid debates about Mexican belonging, national identity, and competing stories about the United States’ past.
