CLS Director Theresa Delgadillo, who is also a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor, published Geographies of Relation: Diasporas and Borderlands in the Americas, in September 2024, and since then, the book has earned notable awards and led to significant speaking engagements. In December of 2025, the Modern Language Association awarded the book its sixteenth Prize in United States Latina and Latina and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies. The Association’s press release notes that Geographies of Relation “masterfully combines borderlands and diaspora theorizing to read relationally, across minoritized difference, taking an extremely timely approach grounded in women-of-color feminist theory and Latinx and Black studies.” It further praises the study for advancing “relational approaches that challenge nationalism and racial exclusions, proposing ‘looking sideways’ and ‘intersecting diasporas’ as frameworks to achieve ‘new communities of belonging. in the Americas.” Theresa Delgadillo is a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of English and Chicanx/e & Latinx/e Studies. The Modern Language Association is the preeminent organization for scholars of language and literature in the United States.
Prof. Delgadillo was also interviewed about the book for the international scholarly books podcast New Books Network by Shodona Kettle from the Institute of the Americas at University College London. The podcast was published on December 2, 2025 and you can listen to the podcast here.
Finally, Professor Delgadillo delivered the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum Lecture at Claremont McKenna College in California in October 2025. Her talk drew from Geographies of Relation and extended its arguments in new directions to consider the work of three twentieth and twenty-first century photographers dedicated to portraying African diaspora communities across the hemisphere. Titled “Borderlands and Diasporas: Contemporary Photography’s Engagements with Race in the Americas,” the lecture was well received by Claremont McKenna students, faculty, and scholars gathered for a symposium on “The Future of Comparative Racializations.”