Karina Alma

Karina Alma serves as an Assistant Professor in the Chicana/o and Central American Studies department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and co-directs the Central American Studies Working Group (2020–present). Her scholarship critically examines systems of race-class-gender intersecting with undocumented migration through frameworks of neoliberalism, settler neocolonialism, and anti-Central Americanism.

Her academic credentials include:

• PhD in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley
• MFA from Mount Saint Mary’s University
• MA in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley
• BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley

Alma’s research explores intercultural/transcultural texts, cultural memories, and identity formations within Central American communities relative to Latinas/os/x. She currently completes a manuscript on Central American diasporic cultural memory while developing future work on anti-Blackness in the Salvadoran nation-state, emphasizing hemispheric agency and resistance narratives.

Her publications reveal consistent engagement with social death theory, cultural memory production, and U.S. Central American literary resistance across Ethnic Studies, Literary Studies, and Cultural Studies disciplines. Key thematic threads include transnational race-gender constructs, diaspora community organizing, and counter-memorial practices.

Recognized with a U.C. President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, she co-edited the seminal anthology U.S. Central Americans: Reconstructing Memories, Struggles and Communities of Resistance (University of Arizona Press, 2017), which received a second printing in 2018.