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Photograph of Kirstie Dorr

Kirstie Dorr Associate Professor CAS | Critical Race Gender and Culture Studies

Contact
Kirstie Dorr
CAS | Critical RGC Studies
4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW 247
Degrees
BS Latin American Studies, University of California, Berkeley
MA Comparative Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkeley
PhD Comparative Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkeley

Bio
Dr. Kirstie Dorr is an associate professor of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies and Literature. An interdisciplinary scholar, her research and teaching are anchored in Black, Indigenous, and Latinx studies, gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, and political geography. Her first book, On Site in Sound: Performance Geographies in América Latina (Duke UP, 2018), examines the hemispheric circulation of South American musics through informal artistic and economic networks, theorizing the dynamic relationship between cultural politics, sonic texts, and spatial contexts.

She is currently at work on two projects. The first is a single-authored monograph. In it, she examines how tropes of domesticity and the domestic—traditionally framed as sites of intimacy, reproduction, and protection—have operated as anchoring racial projects of post-Keynesian state-making, turning intimate relations and everyday scales into laboratories for the extension of punitive state practices. The second is a co-authored anthology, Abolition Everywhere (Kaplan, Wong, and Dorr, eds. Washington UP, 2026), This project brings together scholars and practitioners dismantling policing and the carceral state with those applying abolitionist frameworks in movements ranging from militarism and climate justice to housing, migration, and reproductive justice, in order to develop a new research and action agenda that traces the convergent formation of abolitionist theory and praxis while expanding how we understand carceral power across sites and scales. Dorr’s work has appeared in scholarly periodicals including Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Journal of Popular Music Studies.
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Teaching

Spring 2025

  • LTST-496 Selected Topics:Non-Recurring: U.S. Southern Borders

Fall 2025

  • LTST-200 Intro to Latina/o/x Studies

  • WGSS-225 Gender, Politics & Power