Julie A. Minich
Associate Professor — Ph.D., Stanford University

Contact
- E-mail: minichja@utexas.edu
- Office: PAR 227
- Office Hours: Spring 2018: W Th 10.30am-12pm
Biography
Dr. Minich holds a PhD in Spanish and Portuguese from Stanford University and a BA in Comparative Literature from Smith College. She is the author of Accessible Citizenships: Disability, Nation, and the Cultural Politics of Greater Mexico (Temple University Press, 2014), winner of the 2013-2014 MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latina and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies. Drawing from Chicana/o studies and disability studies, this book works against the common assumption that disability serves primarily as a metaphor for social decay or political crisis, engaging with literary and filmic texts from both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border in which disability functions to extend knowledge of what it means to belong to a political community. Additionally, Dr. Minich’s articles have appeared in journals such as GLQ, Comparative Literature, the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, MELUS, and the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies.
Dr. Minich is currently working on a new book project, tentatively titled Enforceable Care: Health, Justice, and Latina/o Expressive Culture. In this book, Minich explores how Latina/o cultural production depicts public conflict around legislation governing health care and disability accommodations. While mainstream discourses about the distribution of health care often implicitly construct some as deserving of health (and others as undeserving), the texts examined in this study critique health ideologies that present health crises as failures of individual responsibility and create a political environment in which it is seen as a duty of citizenship to maintain oneself in a state of maximum able-bodiedness. Enforceable Care, then, uncovers the social context in which individuals make health decisions to show how health and disease are determined by factors that cannot entirely be reduced to questions of individual choice.
Dr. Minich's courses reflect her interest in the intersection of race, gender, (dis)ability, and health and frequently fulfill requirements for multiple units on campus (in particular, the Department of English, the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, and the Center for Women's and Gender Studies). This brings an intellectually diverse group of students to her classes, and she strives to foster inclusive learning communities in which students are empowered to build knowledge together. For these efforts she has received the Alba Ortiz Graduate Teaching Award (Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies), the Lucia, John, and Melissa Gilbert Teaching Excellence Award (Center for Women's and Gender Studies), the Ana Ixchel Rosal Award (Gender and Sexuality Center), and the Josefina Paredes Endowed Teaching Award (College of Liberal Arts).