Annette M. Rodríguez is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin.
Dr. Rodríguez completed her BA and MA in American Studies at the University of New Mexico and her PhD at Brown University. Her research interests focus on the functions of public violence in U.S. empire and nation building, U.S. racial formation, immigration, and the production of U.S. citizenship. Dr. Rodríguez’s book project in progress Inventing the Mexican: The Visual Culture of Lynching at the Turn of the Twentieth Century centers performance, popular culture, and visuality as assisting in the relational construction of race. This text argues public violences reproduce the vulnerable, unprotected, raced figurations of personhood. In addition, Inventing the Mexican traces the specificity and historical constructions of categorical personhood.
In addition, Dr. Rodríguez has initiated a data, mapping, and social history project on U.S. bounty land grants. This project tracks the over sixty million acres of land granted by both the U.S. federal government and individual states as incentive to serve in the military and as a reward for service. It is provisionally titled Intimate Acquisitions: A Relational History of U.S. Bounty Lands.