Dr. Gwendolyn Ferreti (she/her/ella) is Assistant Professor of Latinx Studies, administratively housed within the Department of Peace and Social Justice at Berea College. She completed her doctoral studies in Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin with a concentration in US-Mexico Borderlands Studies and Activist Anthropology and a graduate portfolio in Mexican American Studies. Before joining the faculty at Berea College, she was an instructor of the Sociology and Anthropology Department at Spelman College and a visiting scholar in the American Studies Department at the University of Alabama. She is a first-generation college student/professor and a second-generation immigrant.

Dr. Ferreti is a transdisciplinary scholar trained as a social anthropologist and ethnographer. She specializes in Latina/o/x and Critical Migration Studies and her research explores Latina/o/x migrantion, life and resistance as well as strategies of immigration enforcement. She is working to develop her first book manuscript, “Empty the Clip: Immigration Enforcement and Latino Immigrant Resistance in Alabama.” This work has been supported by a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship and a University of Texas Center for Mexican American Studies Dissertation Writing Fellowship.

Dr. Ferreti’s secondary research explores Latina adolescent sexual health and healthcare access through reproductive justice and sexual rights frameworks. As a postdoctoral fellow, Ferreti joined an interdisciplinary, community-based, participatory public health team at the Institute of Rural Health Research at the at the University of Alabama. Research related to work has been published in Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology and the Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health. This applied work was supported by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health and has served as the basis for the development of a new health promotion intervention program.

As the first Professor of Latinx Studies at Berea College, Dr. Ferreti is working to grow Latinx Studies on campus and founded the Research Working Group on Gender, Race, Immigration, Dis/ability, and Sexuality (GRIDS)—an initiative to support fellow faculty working on critical and intersectional examinations of power along multiples axes in collaboration with the bell hooks center at Berea College. She is a passionate teacher-scholar and became a Periclean Faculty Leader Program (PFL) to teach a special “Humanities Civic Engagement Course” (CEC).

In addition to her primary duties as faculty, Dr. Ferreti also serves to support students at Berea College. She is the Coordinator of Latino Male Initiative (an externally funded program that combines curricular and co-curricular strategies to encourage Latino student persistence) as well as the Coordinator for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) Student Support.