Skip to main content Skip to navigation

Lisa Guerrero, Ph.D.

Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusive Excellence
Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies
Professor of American Studies and Culture

 

Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned.
–Mark Twain

Any form of art is a form of power; it has impact, it can effect change; it can not only move us, it makes us move.
–Ossie Davis

Dr. Guerrero has taught at WSU since 2004. She was educated near two of the most beautiful beaches in the world, earning her B.A. in English and Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and earning her M.A. and Ph.D. in American literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

She is an interdisciplinary scholar who is particularly dedicated to thinking about the impact of intersectionalities, and the relationships between culture and power in both her scholarly work and her classrooms.

Her central research and teaching interests include African American literature, black masculinity, African American satire and humor, critical popular culture studies, race and commodity culture, and cultural studies.

Selected Publications
Books
  • Crazy Funny: Popular Black Satire and The Method of Madness. Routledge. 2019.
  • African Americans on Television: Race-ing for Ratings, with David J. Leonard. Prager Publishing, 2013.
  • Teaching Race in the 21st Century: College Professors Talk About Their Fears, Risks, and Rewards, editor. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Articles and Book Chapters
  • “New Native Sons: Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kiese Laymon and the Phenomenology of Blackness in the Post-Racial Age,” in CLA Journal, 2018.
  • “Can I Live?:  Contemporary Black Satire and the Postmodern Condition” in Studies in  American Humor, 2016.
  • “(M)Other-In-Chief: Michelle Obama and the Ideal of Republican Womanhood,” in New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism, and Identity, Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff, eds. 2011.
  • “One Nation Under a Hoop: Race, Meritocracy, and Messiahs in the NBA” in Thugs and Dollar Signs: New Racism and the Imagined Black Athlete, David J. Leonard and C. Richard King, eds. 2009.
  • “Fear and Negation in the American Racial Imaginary: Black Bodies in the Wars on Terror and Same-Sex Marriage,” in A New Kind of Containment: “The War on Terror,” Sexuality, and Race, Mary Bloodsworth-Lugo and Carmen Lugo-Lugo, eds., 2009.
  • “Can the Subaltern Shop? The Commodification of Difference in the Bratz Dolls” in Critical Studies <=> Critical Methodologies, Special Issue on Race and Kids’ Pop Culture, 2008.
Public Writing
Research Interests
  • African American masculinity
  • African American satire and humor traditions
  • African American literary traditions
  • Cultural studies
  • Commodification of racial identities/representations
  • Gender and sexuality

Dr. Guerrero is especially interested in the commodification of racialized and gendered identities, the ideological space of black manhood in the American imagination, and the uses of satire and irony in African American literature and popular culture.

Teaching Interests
  • African American literary movements
  • Critical black masculinities
  • Racial representations and responses in American pop culture
  • Ethnic studies
  • Intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality in social identity formation
  • Cultural studies

Contact Dr. Guerrero

laguerre@wsu.edu

Courses Taught

  • Amer_St 505
  • Amer_St 507
  • Amer_St 515
  • Amer_St 524
  • Amer_St 590 (“Cultural Studies”)
  • Amer_St 590 (“The Academic Job Market”)
  • Amer_St 596
  • CES 101
  • CES 201
  • CES 209
  • CES 220
  • CES/Women St 300
  • CES 331
  • CES 332
  • CES 336
  • CES 338
  • CES 405
  • CES 436
  • CES/Women_St 489
  • CES 491
  • CES 493 (now 494)