Director of American Studies and Professor of English and American Studies, American Studies
Adriana Estill (she/her/hers) grew up mainly in Richmond, California with a substantial stint in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico between the ages of 12 and 14. She earned her BA in Humanities Honors (Comparative Literature, focusing on Latin American and German Literatures) at Stanford University, then received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (focusing on Latin American and U.S. Latina/o literatures) from Cornell University.
She started her career as an assistant professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona in 1996, moving to the University of New Mexico to take a tenure-track position in the Spanish and Portuguese department in 1998, and finally beginning her career at Carleton as Assistant Professor of American Studies and English in 2003. Her research, like her career path, has been wide-ranging, but generally focuses on literary and televisual texts as sites of cultural meaning-making, particularly in the intersection of genre, gender, place-making, race, and embodiment.
As the current director of American Studies, she has begun conversations with colleagues about the role of public scholarship in the program. So far, these have led to a revision of the comps process. She is currently planning a new English class called the Poetics of Disability which will eventually have a public scholarship component. And she is a 2023 Loft Poetry Apprentice, working on poems about her family histories.