Sheila Contreras

Sheila Marie Contreras is Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University, where she has previously served as Director of Chicano/Latino Studies in the College of Social Sciences and Associate Dean of DEI and Curriculum in the College of Arts & Letters.  Her scholarship includes Blood Lines: Myth, Indigenism and Chicana/o Literature  (U of Texas Press, 2008) and essays in Latinx Literatures in Transition, 1848-1982, Teaching Late-Twentieth-Century Mexicana and Chicana Writers (MLA, 2020) and Sociology of Race & Ethnicity (2019). Professor Contreras’ essay, “The Spanish-Indian Binary and Anti-Blackness as Literary Inheritance” was recently published in the volume Latinx Literatures in Transition, 1848-1992 (Cambridge University Press, 2025).  Her current research and writing is focused on curriculum and Latinx student achievement and experience.

Profa Contreras entered higher education as a first-generation college student and began her journey to the PhD in the community college system of South Texas.  She earned her Bachelor’s Degree in English from Purdue University, and her Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy in English from The University of Texas at Austin.

A resident of Lansing, she is active in neighborhood issues involving urban environmental justice and K12 library advocacy.