Dr. Claire Fox is M.F. Carpenter Professor in the Departments of English and Spanish & Portuguese at the University of Iowa.  She received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Iowa in 1995. She is a co-founder (with Omar Valerio-Jiménez and Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez) of the Latina/o/x Studies minor, which developed from a series of Latino Midwest events that were held at the University of Iowa in 2012-13 and sponsored by the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies.

Her research interests include literary and cultural studies of the Americas, Latina/o/x American literature and culture, Mexican and U.S.-Mexican border arts and culture, visual culture, and cultural policy. Her current research addresses Latina/o/x American place-making, visual culture, and cultural policy.

She is the author of Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War (Minnesota 2013) and The Fence and the River: Culture and Politics at the U.S.-Mexico Border (Minnesota 1999). With Omar Valerio-Jiménez and Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez, she edited the Latina/o Midwest Reader (Illinois, Latinos in Chicago and the Midwest series, 2017).

Currently, she is a co-principal investigator on “Building Sustainable Worlds: Latinx Placemaking in the Midwest,” a project funded by the Humanities Without Walls consortium.

At U Iowa, she teaches courses on Latina/o/x literature and visual culture.