Biography:

Dr. Alexandria Herrera is an Assistant Professor of Latin American History and International and Area Studies at the University of South Carolina. Her research interests are in the history of public health, reproductive justice, medical experimentation, and gender and sexuality studies in the Americas. Herrera is completing a book manuscript that examines how Guatemalan police, governmental, and public health officials surveilled mixed-race and Indigenous Guatemalan sex workers and children for venereal disease infections in 19th and 20th-century Guatemala City. Herrera argues that Guatemala City's legacy of venereal disease surveillance constructed Indigenous sex workers into medical criminals and contributed to why Indigenous Guatemalans were used as experimental subjects during the U.S. and Guatemalan jointly funded Guatemala Syphilis Experiments (1946-1948).

Herrera is also interested in the reproductive and medical experiences of Latinos/as and members of the Latin American Diaspora in the United States. Her chapter, "The Uterus Collectors: The Lineage of Hemispheric Medical Abuse and Experimentation in the United States and Guatemala," in Resistance and Abolition in the Borderlands: Confronting Trump's Reign of Terror (University of Arizona Press, 2024), connects her historical research on Guatemala to contemporary reports of forced sterilizations of African and Latin American women in the ICE Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC) in Georgia. She argues that without making connections between cases of medical experimentation, including sterilizations across the Americas, researchers and human rights activists are missing the larger historical trajectory of how and why the bodies of women of color are seen as expendable and "suitable" for intimate state-directed medical experimentation and intervention.

Herrera received her dual M.A. (2021) and Ph.D. (2024) in History and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies with a graduate certificate in Latino/a/x Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. She attended the University of Arizona for her bachelor's degree in History and Spanish Literature (2018). Her research has been supported by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship and fellowships from Penn State, including its College of Liberal Arts Research and Graduate Student Office Dissertation Support Competition Award and Center for Information and Humanities Pre-Dissertation fellowship, and the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Department's Judith Hardes Graduate Student Research Award in Reproductive Justice. Herrera enjoys teaching Global Studies, Latinx History and Studies, and Latin American History classes.