Associate Professor, English Associate Professor, specializes in Indigenous literatures and film. Her teaching and research interests include Native literature and film, futurism, gender studies, and LGBT2SQ+ literature. She is the author of Activism and the American Novel: Religion and Resistance in Fiction by Women of Color (University of Virginia Press) and has published essays on literature and film in The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literatures, American Indian Quarterly, Studies in American Indian Literatures, African American Review, and other journals. Recent essays include "Body and Sonic Sovereignty in Inuit Women's Digital Music Videos" in The Women, They Hold the Ground: Indigenous Women's Digital Media in North America (forthcoming 2025) and "Centering Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Futurisms" in The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms (2024). Professor Romero's current book project (under contract with the University of Nebraska Press) explores the complex relationship between Indigenous North American cinema and popular Hollywood genres. Fascinatingly, genres that have been especially egregious in disseminating destructive stereotypes about Indigenous peoples (like horror, science fiction, animation, Westerns, and sport movies) have been appropriated by Indigenous filmmakers for Native ends. This book argues that Indigenous North American filmmakers strategically mobilize narrative and visual tropes from popular genre films to prompt viewers critically to examine cinema stereotypes and also our understandings of nationhood, justice, and environmental sustainability. Recent graduate seminars include "Contemporary Native Literature," "Native American Novel," "Academic Writing," and "Professionalization."
