Race & Ethnic Studies Institute

Dr. Blanton works on the history of Mexican Americans. His book, "The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 1836-1981" was published by TAMU Press in 2004 and explored the intersection between ethnicity, language policy, and education access. Too often we debate policy without fully understanding its past; bilingual instruction in this nation has a rich, fascinating, and instructive past that he was able to excavate through some long-forgotten historical records. A 2003 article in "Pacific Historical Review," continues the focus on education policy via IQ testing in the early 20th century. His new book project, a biography of intellectual and civil rights activist George I. Sanchez, expands to topics dealing with Mexican American racial identity, Black-Brown connections, and civil rights as with his 2006 "Journal of Southern History" article. His work further explores the undocumented immigration question in the 1950s with another article forthcoming in 2009. I view my work's emphasis upon policy and civil rights as a way to engage a living, breathing history. Though some historians shy away from topics that especially resonate in the present, Dr. Blanton views his intellectual mission as a historian to take on such modern-sounding topics and interrogate their pasts.

My fields of expertise are Feminist Theory, Gender and Colonialism, South Asia Studies and Indian Cinema, and Transnational Feminisms. I am a tenured associate professor of English at Texas A&M University and an affiliate of the Women’s Studies and Film Studies programs here. From 2003-2006 I served as chair of the department of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Toledo. I have taught and published on feminism and visual culture, colonial and postcolonial analyses of eighteenth-century literature, and gender in South Asia. My dissertation research resulted in the publication of Reading the Splendid Body: Gender and Consumerism in Eighteenth-Century British Writing on India (University of Delaware Press, 1998), an examination of the transnational intersections of sexual identity, language and colonial power in the eighteenth century. I have since published a second book with Ashgate press (2006) in which I explore transnational consciousness of gender and racial identities evolving within slavery, colonialism and connoisseurship in the late eighteenth-century transatlantic world. This book, titled Slavery, Colonialism and Connoisseurship: Gender and Eighteenth-Century Literary Transnationalism, explores the redefinition of Taste and Value as cultural and moral concepts in gender and racial discourses in slave-owning, colonizing and connoisseurial Britain. As a result of a fellowship in the Ford Foundation's Globalization project at the University of Chicago in 1996, my academic interests widened to include Globalization Studies, Transnationalism, and South Asia Studies. I am now finishing a book on Indian cinema as mediation of the classic political binary known as the nation-state. The book examines the "double role" of state and nation in Indian cinema's drama of political remembering and forgetting. Understanding the complementary double-ness of state and nation is key to comprehending the cinema's key referent and subject of address: the gendered spectator and citizen.