Fields of Interest
Biography
Raised on L.A. radio, Michelle Habell-Pallán grew up in Downey, California. She is a professor of Chicana/Latina Studies in the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies and adjunct in the School of Music and Communication at the University of Washington. She earned a PhD in Literature and Cultural Studies from the University of California at Santa Cruz.
A respected cultural critic, digital archivista, and exhibit curator, she authored Loca Motion: The Travels of Chicana/Latina Popular Culture (NYU Press) and coedited Latino/a Popular Culture (NYU Press). In her role as public scholar she is a curator of the award-winning bilingual and currently traveling exhibit American Sabor: Latinos in U.S. Popular Music hosted by the Smithsonian Institution's Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES). As a digital feminista that seeks to transform digital humanities through community engagement, she co-founded and co-directs the University of Washington Libraries Women Who Rock: Making Scenes, Building Communities Oral History Archive.
Habell-Pallán is recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Research Award as well as a Woodrow Wilson Foundation Research Award for her innovative research on gender, popular music and culture. She has been awarded a 2014 Digital Commons Faculty Summer Fellowship, sponsored by the Simpson Center for Humanities to support the Women Who Rock: Making Scene, Building Communities Oral History Archive.
She makes community & music with the Seattle Fandango Project and is a member of the Fembot Collective|Gender, New Media & Technology.
Her article, "'Death to Racism and Punk Revisionism': Alice Bag's Vexing Voice and the Unspeakable Influence of Canción Ranchera on Hollywood Punk," appears in Pop When the World Falls Apart: Music in the Shadow of Doubt (Duke University Press, 2012) and her new manuscript Beat Migration: Transmediating "American Sabor" for the Digital Humanities is in progress.
Contact her at mhabellp@u.washington.edu.