Flores, Lori

Office Hours

Fall 2025: Tuesdays, 11:00 - 12:30 pm, and Thursdays, 1:00 - 2:30 pm. Please make an appointment here.

Education

PhD, History, Stanford University (2011)
BA, History with Distinction, Yale University (2005)

Interests and Research

I am Associate Professor of History and a Core Faculty member for the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER). My research and writing focuses on Latino/x life, labor, and politics in the United States from the 1940s to the present.

My new book, Awaiting Their Feast: Latinx Food Workers and Activism from World War II to COVID-19 (UNC Press, 2025) traces how the United States' dual appetite for Latinx food and Latinx food labor enveloped different people and industries between World War II and COVID. It has been named “Book of the Year” by the International Labor History Association and the “Big Book of 2025” by the journal Labor.

To augment this book research, I created The Mexican Restaurants of NYC StoryMap with two former doctoral students. This website provides a digital history of how Mexican food spread throughout New York City's boroughs from the 1930s to the present.

My award-winning first book, Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement (Yale University Press, 2016) analyzed the historical relationships between Mexican Americans, bracero guestworkers, and undocumented immigrants in their struggles for civil and labor rights in California’s Salinas Valley.

I am also the co-editor of the revised edition of The Academic's Handbook (Duke University Press, 2020). This anthology is full of wise, accessible essays about navigating academia from a diverse array of scholars across disciplines and career stages/paths.

To date, I have received fellowships for my research and writing from the Russell Sage Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy, the Huntington Library, the Beinecke Library, and the Ford Foundation. I have also recently been named an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer for 2023-2026, and can be booked for a talk or event through the OAH.

I'm excited to train undergraduate and graduate students interested in Latino/x history as well as the general topics of race and migration in the US, labor and working class history, food history, women's and gender history, civil rights and protest movements, oral history, the American West and the US-Mexico border region, and global borderlands history.

Courses

Professor Flores's rotating courses include:

Lectures

The History of Latinos in the United States; Immigration in American History; The History of the U.S. Working Class

Seminars

Food, Race, and Migration; Readings in Latino/x History; Readings in Labor History; Oral History: Ethics and Craft; Latino New York; The U.S.-Mexico Borderlands; Global Borderlands; Ugly Histories of Beautiful Things

Publications

“Mapping Mexican Food History in New York,” co-authored with Fernando Amador II and Ximena López Carrillo, for the “Latinx Digital Humanities: Method, Theory, and Praxis” special issue of Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures Vol. 8 No. 2 (Spring 2025), 120-144.

“Wreathed in Worry, Pining for Protection: Latino Forestry Workers and Historical Traumas in Maine,” Journal of American History Vol. 109 No. 4 (March 2023), 828-854.
*Winner of the Robert W. Cherny Prize, Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association

“The Career of Chef Zarela Martinez and a Changing Mexican Foodscape in New York City, 1981-2011," Food, Culture, & Society Vol. 26 (2023), 241-264.

“Latino Food Workers in the U.S., 1880-2020,” The Oxford Research Encyclopedia for American History (Fall 2020),
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.850