LORI FLORES
Associate Professor (Ph.D., Stanford University, 2011)
Curriculum vitae
Office: SBS S-333 (History)
SBS N-333 (LACS Director's Office)
Email: lori.flores@stonybrook.edu
Interests: Twentieth-century US, Latino/x, immigration, race, labor, gender, food, oral history, US-Mexico borderlands
My research and writing focuses on Latino/x life, labor, and politics in the United States from the post-WWII era to the present day. My new book, Awaiting Their Feast: Latinx Food Workers and Activism from World War II to COVID-19 (UNC Press, 2025) traces how the United States' dual appetite for Lantinx food and Latinx food labor evolved from World War II to Covid.
To augment this book research, I have created a digital history project (with Stony Brook PhD alumni Fernando Amador II and Ximena López Carrillo) called The Mexican Restaurants of NYC StoryMap, which provides a digital history of how Mexican food spread throughout New York City's boroughs from the 1930s to the present.
My award-winning first book, Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement (Yale University Press, 2016) analyzed the historical relationships between Mexican Americans, braceros, and undocumented immigrants in their struggles for civil and labor rights in California’s Salinas Valley.
I am also the co-editor of the new revised edition of The Academic's Handbook (Duke University Press, 2020). This anthology is full of wise, accessible essays about navigating academia from a diverse array of scholars across disciplines and career stages/paths.
Since 2022, I have been the Director of Stony Brook's Latin/x American and Caribbean Studies Center and Program. LACS serves as a social hub for students and faculty, and provides an academic community that features speakers, internships, scholarships and research grants, and an undergraduate Minor degree.
To date, I have received fellowships for my research and writing from the Russell Sage Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy, the Huntington Library, the Beinecke Library, and the Ford Foundation. I have also recently been named an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer for 2023-2026, and can be booked for a talk or event through the OAH.
I'm excited to train undergraduate and graduate students interested in Latinx history as well as the general topics of race and migration in the US, labor and working class history, food history, women's and gender history, civil rights and protest movements, oral history, the American West and the US-Mexico border region, and global borderlands history.
Recent Courses Taught
The History of Latinos in the U.S. (undergrad lecture)
Food, Race, and Migration (undergrad seminar)
Oral History: Ethics and Craft (graduate seminar)
Recent Works and Interviews
- “Wreathed in Worry, Pining for Protection: Latino Forestry Workers and Historical Traumas in Maine,” Journal of American History
- “The Career of Chef Zarela Martinez and a Changing Mexican Foodscape in New York City, 1981-2011," Food, Culture, & Society
- Featured Guest, “Lori Flores Breaks Down Latinx Food and Drink Labor in the United States,” Boss Barista podcast (https://podcasts.apple.com/za/podcast/lori-flores-breaks-down-latinx-food-and-drink-labor/id1201025101?i=1000575477898)
PERSONAL WEBSITE
www.loriaflores.com