Inés Casillas

Biography

Dolores Inés Casillas is Director of the Chicano Studies Institute and Professor in the Department of
Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). She is also affiliated
faculty with Film & Media Studies, the Center for Information Technology and Society (CITS), and
Applied Linguistics as well as a former UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Santa Cruz and former
Faculty Fellow at Stanford University.
Her research focuses on immigrant engagement with U.S. Spanish-language and bilingual media. Author
of Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-language Radio and Public Advocacy (NYU Press, 2014), which
received two book prizes, co-editor with María Elena Cepeda (Williams College) of the Companion to
Latina/o Media Studies (Routledge Press, 2016), and co-editor with Mary Bucholtz and Jin Sook Lee
(UCSB) of Feeling It: Language, Race and Affect in Latinx Youth Learning (Routledge Press, 2018), her
current manuscript, under contract with New York University Press, explores the politics of language
learning and language play as heard through different sound media technologies.
Prof. Casillas has served as a Lead PI and/or co-PI on several federal and private foundation grants,
totaling over six million dollars, all directed towards strengthening the retention rates and applied
learning experiences of undergraduates of color. She takes great pride in being a part of a campus
community with the dual designation as a premiere research institution as well as a Hispanic Serving
Institution (HSI).
Her proudest accomplishment includes not only mentoring five first-generation, immigrant, and/or
students of color through the doctoral program at UCSB but also diversifying our national archives by
successfully nominating Latinx songs and artists into the National Recording Registry (Library of
Congress).