Catherine S. Ramírez, a UC Santa Cruz professor and chair of the Latin American and Latino Studies Department, was one of 15 thought leaders selected from top universities across the country to become a 2025-2026 Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar.
The Phi Beta Kappa Society is one of the nation's oldest and most prestigious academic honor societies and is dedicated to honoring outstanding student achievement in the liberal arts and sciences and promoting the importance of lifelong liberal arts and sciences education. The Visiting Scholar Program was founded in 1956 to offer participating undergraduates the opportunity to spend time with some of America’s most distinguished scholars.
Visiting Scholars travel to universities and colleges across the country with Phi Beta Kappa chapters and spend two days on each campus meeting informally with undergraduates, participating in classroom lectures and seminars, and giving one major lecture open to the academic community and general public. The local Phi Beta Kappa chapter at UC Santa Cruz has hosted visiting scholars from other campuses the past two years. The last UC Santa Cruz faculty member to be selected as a visiting scholar was James Zachos in 2017-2018.
Ramírez's scholarship focuses on Latinx literature, visual culture, and performance; Mexican American women's history; zoot suits and style politics; immigration and assimilation; historical memory and erasure; and speculative fiction. Through the Visiting Scholars program, she will share her work on “postmigrancy” (the nation of immigrants that rejects immigrants), child migrants, the future of labor and undocumentedness, and Latinxfuturism.
“I’m looking forward to learning from a highly motivated group of students and to being in dialogue with scholars in other regions of the country about complex subjects like immigration and illegality,” she said. “I also hope to work with students on public writing and how we can connect our personal experiences to history, culture, and society so that one sheds light on the other.”
In addition to her upcoming travels as a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, Ramírez will also teach a Global Seminar in Madrid this summer through UC Santa Cruz Global Learning that will explore migration from Latin America to Spain. The deadline to register for that course is March 1.
