The Conference Committee is pleased to welcome Professor Monica Huerta as our 2023 Keynote Speaker. Professor Huerta is an Assistant Professor of English and American Studies at Princeton University whose work investigates the aesthetic life of power in the United States. In her first book, Magical Habits, published by Duke University Press in 2021, Professor Huerta draws on her upbringing amid Chicago’s Mexican restaurants to think through the residues of racial capitalism in everyday life. Entwining a variety of media and creative approaches to storytelling, Magical Habits was called a “striking debut” by the New York Times Book Review and won the Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award. This year, her second book, The Unintended: Photography, Property, and the Aesthetics of Racial Capitalism, will be published by NYU Press as part of the America and the Long 19th Century series. The Unintended considers the aesthetic life of property rights and whiteness in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Professor Huerta is also at work on a project about the face and emergent technologies of surveillance. She helps organize the Women* of Color Student-Faculty Corners series at Princeton, and is a co-founder and co-director of Organizing Stories: Toward a Scholarly-Activist Praxis. We are pleased to welcome Professor Huerta for this year’s keynote address.

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