Biography

Carla Guerrón Montero, Ph.D., is a professor with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Delaware. She is also the associate director of the Center for Material Culture Studies (CMCS) at the University of Delaware. She holds joint appointments in Latin American and Iberian studies, Africana studies, and the Department of Women and Gender Studies. 

Guerrón Montero is an applied cultural anthropologist trained in the United States and Latin America, specializing in the anthropology of tourism, the anthropology of food, the African diaspora, and applied/engaged anthropology.

She received a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology and Latin American Studies from the University of Oregon, an M.A. in applied anthropology from Oregon State University, and a Licenciatura degree in socio-cultural Anthropology from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador (Quito, Ecuador). ​

Guerrón Montero studies the complex and multiple meanings and representations of identities among marginalized populations in modern Latin American and Caribbean nation-states, specifically Brazil, Ecuador, Grenada, and Panama. She is the author of The Color of the Panela: Study of Afro-Ecuadorian Women in the Afro-Ecuadorian Andes (Centro Cultural Afro-Ecuatoriano, 2000), From Temporary Migrants to Permanent Attractions: Tourism, Cultural Heritage, and Afro-Antillean Identities in Panama (University of Alabama Press, 2020), and its translation to Spanish, Población Afroantillana y Turismo en Panamá: De Migrantes Temporales a Atractivos Permanentes (Editorial FLACSO, 2023).  She is also the co-editor of Careers in 21st Century Applied Anthropology: Advice from Academics and Practitioners (Wiley, 2008) and co-editor of Why the World Needs Anthropologists (Routledge, 2021). This volume received the 2021 Excellence Science Award by the Slovenian Research Agency.

In addition to authoring several book chapters, Guerrón Montero has published in English, Spanish, and Portuguese in academic journals such as Anthropological Quarterly, Bulletin for Latin American Research, Ethnology, Human Organization, the Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, Ecology of Food and Nutrition, Revista Plural, Revista Íconos, among others.  

Her research and studies have been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Fulbright Program, the Ford Foundation, the Inter-American Foundation, the Nippon Foundation (Japan), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the National Secretary for Higher Education, Science, and Technology (SENESCYT, Ecuador). She has been a fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York) and Senior Researcher and Lecturer at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (Quito, Ecuador). Additionally, Guerrón Montero has been Visiting Researcher at the Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation's (CEDLA) in Amsterdam (Netherlands); the Catalan Institute for Research on Cultural Patrimony (ICRPC) in Girona (Spain); the Museu Nacional of the Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil); the University of Ljubljana and Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU) in Ljubljana (Slovenia); and the Institut des Hautes Etudes de L'Amérique Latine IHEAL, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle 3 (France).​​​

Guerrón Montero is the treasurer of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) and a member of the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) Outreach and Education Advisory Board.