Department of English

Mina Quesen is a proud Asian-Latina scholar who is passionate about the ways we dream of new worlds. She works within the intersection of Latina studies, Asian American Studies, feminist studies, speculative fiction (including myths and folklore), and historical analysis.

Her academic interests include how Asian American and Latina women writers create monsters within speculative fiction (particularly how immigrant daughters aretransformed into the monstrous), the experimental boundaries of genre utilizing the speculative, and narratives which reckon with colonialism, its afterlives, and imagining its deconstruction.

Mina is also passionate about education access and utilizes her understanding of the speculative as a way of teaching other first-generation, low-income students how to dream big. This is primarily through coaching them through college applications and teaching them how to tell their own stories. She ultimately aspires to
blend creative and scholarly modes to accomplish this work. 

At the heart of it all, Mina studies monsters in order to execute her mission: to teach others how to identify and fight them, whatever their individual path may be.