Genaro M.  Padilla is Professor of English at the University of California –Berkeley.   He is one of the leading scholars of Mexican-American and Chicano/a literature in the United States and has written extensively on Latino culture and literature and on the American Southwest. His books include The Daring Flight of My Pen: Cultural Politics and  Pérez de Villagrá’s Historia de la Nueva Mexico, 1610;   My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography; Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage (co-editor);   Nuevomexicano Cultural Legacy: Forms, Agencies and Discourse (co-editor); Power, Race and Gender in Academe: Strangers in the Tower? (co-editor).  Padilla has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Premio Critical Nueva Fourth Annual Award for Excellence in Literary Scholarship; Modern Language Association Honorable Mention for his book The Daring Flight of My Pen ;  Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship; the William Kimball Rice Fellowship at Stanford University Humanities Center.

His current project will focus on Chicano visual/sculptural art in conversation with the wider correspondences of U.S., Mexican and European modernisms.