Anthony Mora is currently an Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. His principal research interests focus on the historical construction of race, gender, and sexuality in the U.S. Southwest. He is currently writing a history of the fictional character of Zorro from 1919 to the present. The iconic swordsman serves as a means of tracing the changing representations of Mexican Americans, historical memory, and U.S. regionalism. Mora's first book, Border Dilemmas: Racial and National Uncertainties in New Mexico, 1848-1912 (2011) explores how the first generations of Mexicans living in the United States grappled with the racial and national ideologies that circulated along the nineteenth-century border.
Mora has also been the PI for a project to increase the diversity of graduate students pursuing Ph.D.'s in the humanities. This multi-campus project has brought together faculty from the University of Michigan, the University of New Mexico, Morehouse College, and Spelman College. Before joining the University of Michigan, Mora previously taught history at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, and was a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Mass. Mora teaches courses on Mexican American history, Latina/o history, and the history of sexuality.
