Join us for our Wednesday Lunch Series, featuring guest speakers from Cornell's faculty and staff as well as the surrounding community. Enjoy an informal discussion where you can learn more about the speaker’s work or research, how they ended up doing what they are doing, current issues in higher education, or even their thoughts on living in Ithaca. A free lunch will be served.

Formerly a bilingual elementary school teacher and adult English language instructor in the Latino communities of Los Angeles, Professor Villenas moved to North Carolina to pursue a PhD at UNC-Chapel Hill and study education in diverse Latino im/migrant destinations. She inquired into how Latina mothers navigated parenting and their children's schooling as they worked to create a sense of community and belonging in the changing racial/ethnic landscape of North Carolina.

Professor Villenas continues these interests with research about education, citizenship and social movement in the United States. In a current project, she explores the pedagogical force and everyday imaginative quality of social movement - specifically the teaching and learning of racial justice and cultural citizenship in community forums, festivals, workshops, celebrations, protests and other sites of public pedagogy. She also considers Latinx cultural programming as critical sites of adult and cross-generational learning. She is moved to think with Latina/Chicana and women of Color feminist thought as a way to perceive transformative and resistant modes of teaching, learning and social action.

Having previously worked in schools and colleges of education preparing prospective teachers, Professor Villenas's scholarship has also addressed socio-cultural, critical race and feminist perspectives in Latina/o K-12 education and higher education, including teacher education. 

She is a former president of the American Educational Studies Association (AESA), a scholarly organization dedicated to the study of the social and cultural foundations of education, and past president of the Council on Anthropology and Education of the American Anthropological Association. She served as director of Cornell's Latina/o Studies Program from 2009 to 2016.