J. Felix Gallion

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J. Felix Gallion joins the Lewis Center for the Arts with a focus on interdisciplinary approaches to the study of performance, media, race, labor, and migration. Their current research explores U.S. agriculture as a carceral system through the lived experiences of Mexican American/Chicanx farmworkers.

They are currently working on two book projects and a feature film screenplay. The first, The Sub-Infra Life of Camp Carcerality: Abolitionism in Afro-Chicanx Agricultural Labor, examines how the agro-carceral regime and its enforcement by police turns every space on the migrant trail into carceral space for migrant Mexican/Chicanx farmworkers and their descendants. Their second book, tentatively titled Cuando Sentí El Miedo uses ghost stories and other performances of the supernatural as a narrative archive of farmwork. Written as a companion piece to their book projects, their feature film Valentina follows a family of South Texas Chicanx farmworkers who experience the violence of life on the migrant trail across the 20th century. They learn that when you work the fields, there are ghosts in the soil.

Gallion’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Guardian, US Latina & Latino Oral History Journal, and Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures. They hold a Ph.D. and M.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.A. in English and American Studies from Cornell University. He is advised by Brian Herrera, Associate Professor of Theater in the Lewis Center for the Arts.