Anna Romina Guevarra

Anna Romina Guevarra serves as Professor and Founding Director of the Global Asian Studies Program at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), where she led the program's evolution from Asian American Studies (2012-2016) to establish the first Midwest B.A. in Global Asian Studies in 2022. As Co-PI of the UIC AANAPISI Initiative and Social Justice and Human Rights Cluster, she bridges academic research with community activism through projects like Dis/Placements that document urban displacement resistance in Chicago.

Her educational background includes a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, San Francisco (2003) and dual BAs in Women's Studies and Biological Sciences from UC Irvine (1996).

Professor Guevarra's research centers immigrant and transnational labor, geopolitics of carework, Philippine diaspora, and food studies through transnational feminist and critical race lenses. She examines racialized/gendered labor brokering, technology's impact on care work, and culinary diasporas as sites of imperial resistance. Her teaching includes courses on Global Asia in Chicago, Asian American Women in the Global Economy, and Food Politics.

Recent publications reveal a trajectory from labor migration analysis (2010s) toward technology-mediated care and public history (2020s), consistently highlighting how robotics reshapes racialized labor boundaries and how foodways like bibingka map diasporic resistance across South/Southeast Asia.

Her notable awards include the Inaugural UIC Faculty Community Engagement Award (2021-2022), William J. Holland Prize (2019), and American Sociological Association's Distinguished Book Award (2010).

Securing major grants including the U.S. Department of Education AANAPISI Initiative (2021-2026) and Ford Foundation funding, she mentors students through study abroad courses like 'Labor, Gender, Food, and Social Justice' in India and serves on advisory boards for Full Spectrum Features, AFIRE, and Northside Action for Justice. Current projects explore robotic care mediation, Uptown Chicago's displacement history, and bibingka's culinary trajectories.

Her Dis/Placements project team collaborates with community organizations to document Chicago's multiracial resistance movements, while her Bumbay Bibingka research uses food as an analytic optic for tracing empire-diaspora connections across three cities.