Roberto Lint Sagarena

Roberto Lint Sagarena is Professor of American Studies at Middlebury College and serves as the Director of Faculty Mentoring and directs the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity. He holds degrees in Art History and Philosophy from the University of California at Santa Cruz and an MA and PhD in Religion from Princeton University. Prior to joining Middlebury’s faculty in 2009, he was a post-doctoral Instructor of the history of the American West at the California Institute of Technology and taught for nearly a decade at the University of Southern California in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity and the School of Religion.

His research interests center on the history of the North American Borderlands, the role of visual culture in the formation of racial, ethnic, and regional identities throughout the Americas, and the construction of public histories and traditions with particular attention to social relations resulting from inequity. He is the author of Aztlan and Arcadia: Religion, Ethnicity, and the Creation of Place (2014 NYU Press) and has published in journals and anthologies on the topics of religious murals in public places, the religious imagination of Gloria Anzaldua, and the production of place and counter-space as it shapes race and ethnicity. More recent work has turned towards the study of fictional worldbuilding as a practice that transforms our understanding of reality and has powerful influence on popular beliefs and practices in the real world.

Lint Sagarena served as the founding director of the Anderson Freeman Intercultural Center and house advisor for PALANA. He was appointed as the cohort mentor for the first group of C3 program post-doctoral instructors at Middlebury and is currently responsible for new faculty orientation and mentoring programs. After serving as chair of the Faculty Strategy Committee he will be joining the Promotions Committee in the Fall of 2024. He has served the profession as the elected Director at Large of the American Academy of Religion (2012-15), served on the editorial board of Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, and regularly reviews manuscripts for a number of university presses and journals.