Kate AguilarFaculty

Kate Aguilar's research examines Miami and South Florida as critical locations for understanding American conservatism in the 1980s and the national ascendency of the New Right, embodied in Ronald Reagan. It shows how the intersection of race, gender, and sport helped popularize Reagan’s individual story as a national narrative of American exceptionalism, moral and martial power, and heroic White manhood. Using the University of Miami football team of the mid-1980s and their stadium, the Orange Bowl, as case studies, her work deconstructs the common Black/White racial binary of traditional studies of Cold War conservatism and argues that scholars of the Right and post-1968 political realignments must engage with the Global South to appreciate how New Right policies and leadership were crafted in response to images of a multiracial, multicultural, multilingual, and multinational urban scene. Kate is also a trained diversity and inclusion practitioner and social activist. 

“Books saved my sanity, knowledge opened the locked places in me and taught me first how to survive and then how to soar.”
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa

Courses Taught