Aja Martinez Ph.D.

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Aja Y. Martinez (she/her) is an associate professor of ­­­­­­­­English and author of the multi-award-winning book  Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory (2nd edition forthcoming). Her scholarship engages with both public and academic audiences in a series of new projects that include several critical academic journal essays and book chapters, a CRT theoretical introductory chapter for a Routledge collection, a special College English double issue on CRT, CRT symposia in three academic journals, and four book-length projects. Three book projects, co-researched and -written with UNT historian and Indigenous studies scholar Robert O. Smith, are under contract with New York University Press, Penn State University Press, and University of California Press--kicking off Cal UP's new series on CRT. Within these projects Martinez and Smith draw on mixed methods, ranging from archival, to ethnographic, to literary and rhetorical analysis. These books reframe the histories of CRT's origins in legal studies while making provocative claims concerning CRT's storytelling pedagogy, methodology, and theory. Additionally, Martinez is coeditor and cofounder, with Michele Eodice and Sandra Tarabochia (University of Oklahoma), of the transdisciplinary, digital open-access, and multimodal journal  Writers: Craft and Context. Last, Martinez is coeditor, with Stacey Waite (University of Nebraska) of the University of Pittsburgh Press's series  Composition, Literacy, and Culture.

LitHub Roundtable: On the Importance of Critical Race Theory--and the Delusional Attacks On It Richard Delgado, Aja Martinez, and Victor Ray in Conversation on Structural Racism, the Future of CRT, and More.