Michelle Habell-Pallán

photo credit: Angelica Macklin

Michelle Habell-Pallán, associate professor of performance culture of the Americas in the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, and adjunct associate professor in the School of Music and Department of Communication, at the University of Washington (UW), is currently the Director of the Certificate for Public Scholarship. For her fifteen years plus of community engagement and the arts, she recently received the Barclay Simpson Prize for Scholarship in Public, which recognizes her efforts to foster the humanities as a public good. Her research examines music, performance, and theater as communal forms of expression that archive alternative histories used to imagine new futures. In tandem, her research also reflects on the way developing media platforms compel new methods of cultural expression, research, archiving and delivery. Her most current research considers dialogues between feminista movements and hip hop feminista musics in Ecuador and its relationship to indigenous social movements rooted in Andean concepts of Sumak Kawsai (Right-living). She is the Co-Director of the UW Honors Quito, Ecuador Study Abroad Program.

Habell-Pallán authored Loca Motion: The Travels of Chicana/Latina Popular Culture (NYU Press). Her most recent book is the bilingual American Sabor: Latinos and Latinas in US Popular Music: Latinos y Latinas en La Música Popular Estadounidense co-authored with Marisol Berrios-Miranda and Shannon Dudley, published by University of Washington Press (Autumn January 2017).   Her single-authored book Chicanxfuturism: Punk’s Beat Migration and the Sounds of Buen Vivir is in-progress.

Habell-Pallán guest-curated the award-winning bilingual traveling exhibit American Sabor: Latinos in U.S. Popular Music hosted by Smithsonian Institution’s Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES).  As a digital feminista she transforms digital humanities, through community engagement, as co-director of University of Washington Libraries Women Who Rock (WWR): Making Scenes, Building Communities Oral History Archive.

A former UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Habell-Pallán is recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Research Award, Woodrow Wilson Foundation Research Award, UW Royal Research Fund Award, and UW Simpson Center Digital Commons Faculty Fellowship (underwritten by the Mellon Foundation).

Habell-Pallán makes community &  music with the Seattle Fandango Project, and is a member of the Fembot Collective|Gender, New Media & Technology. She collaborates with a range of local community partners to direct the Women Who Rock: Making Scenes, Building Communities Collective, whose free and family-friendly Seattle unConference/Encuentro takes place annually.