About

Mary Pat Brady is a professor in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. She is the author of the books 'Scales of Captivity: Racial Capitalism and the Latinx Child' and 'Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space,' both published by Duke University Press. Her work on 'Extinct Lands' was awarded the Modern Language Association’s Prize for the Best Work of Latina/o and Chicana/o Literary and Cultural Criticism. Brady has served as an associate editor of three editions of the Heath Anthology of American Literature, where she contributed to expanding the understanding of Latina/o authors' contributions to US literature. She also edited the ten-volume Gale Researcher: 20th and 21st Century American Literature Series (2017) and has authored numerous essays on Chicana literature, including the award-winning essay 'The Contrapuntal Geographies of Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories.' Currently, she is the Director of the American Studies Program at Cornell University. Her research focuses on Chicana and Latine literature, film and culture, hemispheric literatures, critical geography, and children's literature. Brady is a proud, queer Chicana and is also a parent to three individuals.

Research topics

• Humanities
• Psychology
• Philosophy
• Theology
• Computer Science
• Art
• Biomedical engineering
• Epistemology
• Archaeology
• Psychoanalysis
• Engineering
• World Wide Web
• Art history
• Linguistics
• History
• Literature

Selected publications

• Borders and the Liminal

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-05-07

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• MONTSERRAT FONTES:

  University of Arizona Press eBooks · 2023-10-10

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• specular morality, the war on drugs, and anxieties of visibility

  University of Arizona Press eBooks · 2022-02-08

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• Hemispheric Routes

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2021

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  • History
  • Art history
  • Art

  Mary Pat Brady’s chapter poses an alternative approach to hemispheric fiction by reading not according the scales of concentric geometries of space (local, regional, national, transnational), but instead reconceptualizing what she terms “pluriversal novels of the 21st century.” She argues for attending to the complexly mixed temporalities, perspectives, and languages of novels that reject the dualism of monoworlds (center/periphery) for the unpredictability of stories anchored in multiple space-times. While this is not an exclusively 21st-century phenomenon, she shows that pluriveral fiction has flourished recently, as works by Linda Hogan, Jennine Capó Crucet, Julia Alvarez, Gabby Rivera, Karen Tei Yamashita, Ana-Maurine Lara, and Evelina Zuni Lucero demonstrate.

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• Session One. A Question of Genealogies: Always Already (Chicana/o) Cultural Studies?

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

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• 6 Border

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

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• Session Three. Staking the Claim: Introducing Applied Chicana/o Cultural Studies

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

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• 5. The Waiting Arms of Gold Street: Manuel Muñoz’s Faith Healer of Olive Avenue and the Problem of the Scaffold Imaginary

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020 · 1 citations

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  • Humanities
  • Art
  • Humanities
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• Session Two. Chicana/o Cultural Studies: Marking Interdisciplinary Relationships and Conjunctures

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020

  • Computer Science
  • Psychology
  • Computer Science
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• Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies

  2020-11-20

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  A train station becomes a police station; lands held sacred by Apaches and Mexicanos are turned into commercial and residential zones; freeway construction hollows out a community; a rancho becomes a retirement community-these are the kinds of spatial transformations that concern Mary Pat Brady in Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies, a book bringing together Chicana feminism, cultural geography, and literary theory to analyze an unusual mix of Chicana texts through the concept of space. Beginning with nineteenth-century short stories and essays and concluding with contemporary fiction, this book reveals how Chicana literature offers a valuable theoretics of space.The history of the American Southwest in large part entails the transformation of lived, embodied space into zones of police surveillance, warehouse districts, highway interchanges, and shopping malls-a movement that Chicana writers have contested from its inception. Brady examines this long-standing engagement with space, first in the work of early newspaper essayists and fiction writers who opposed Anglo characterizations of Northern Sonora that were highly detrimental to Mexican Americans, and then in the work of authors who explore border crossing. Through the writing of Sandra Cisneros, Cherríe Moraga, Terri de la Peña, Norma Cantú, Monserrat Fontes, Gloria Anzaldúa, and others, Brady shows how categories such as race, gender, and sexuality are spatially enacted and created-and made to appear natural and unyielding. In a spatial critique of the war on drugs, she reveals how scale-the process by which space is divided, organized, and categorized-has become a crucial tool in the management and policing of the narcotics economy

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Frequent coauthors

• Richard Yarborough

  5 shared

• James Kyung-Jin Lee

  5 shared

• Ivy Schweitzer

  5 shared

• John Alberti

  Northern Kentucky University

  5 shared

• Quentin Miller

  5 shared

• Jackson R. Bryer

  5 shared

• Anne Goodwyn Jones

  5 shared

• Sandra A. Zagarell

  5 shared

Awards & honors

• Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and…
• Modern Language Association’s Prize for the Best Work of Lat…
• Norman Foerster Prize for the best essay published in Americ…