René Esparza researches how space, migration, and public health shape the racial and sexual politics of the modern United States. His work examines how institutions such as urban planning, public health, and immigration policy produce unequal forms of citizenship, belonging, and exclusion, with particular attention to queer and trans communities of color.
Esparza is the author of From Vice to Nice: Midwestern Politics and the Gentrification of AIDS (University of North Carolina Press), which argues that public health and urban redevelopment worked together to reshape LGBTQ politics and deepen racial inequality during the AIDS epidemic. His current book project, Exiled and Excludable: Queer and Trans Cuban Refugees and the Making of U.S. Sexual Citizenship, reinterprets the 1980 Mariel Boatlift as a pivotal moment in the history of U.S. immigration, refugee policy, and LGBTQ politics.
An interdisciplinary historian working across Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, urban history, and public health, Esparza teaches courses on the history of sexuality, queer and trans studies, public health, queer of color critique, and the politics of race, space, and migration. He holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.