Dr. Jennifer Gómez Menjívar's research interests include Indigenous Sovereignty Media, Latin American and Latinx Media, Grassroots and Participatory Media Practices, Cinematic Adaptation, Digital Culture, Critical Theory, and Media Linguistics. She holds a Ph.D. in Latin/x American Cultural Studies from The Ohio State University, and her scholarly training is in the production, circulation, and reception of texts, from traditional print to contemporary digital. For the last several years, her research has been concerned with how Indigenous and Black communities use new media to challenge the typical discussions of minority communities as disenfranchised and powerless. These projects are concerned with how phenomena like hashtag movements, TikTok journalism, YouTube videos, Twitter memes, and Facebook groups are increasingly necessary in concrete undertakings such as autonomy and self-governance, language revitalization, minority entrepreneurship, and grassroots organizing.

Her articles have appeared in venues such as the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, Applied Linguistics, Chasqui, Diálogo, Hispanófila, Romance Notes, Transmodernity, NAIS Journal, and Mesoamérica, among others. Her books include Tropical Tongues: Language Ideologies, Endangerment, and Minority Languages in Belize (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) and Black in Print: Plotting the Coordinates of Blackness in Central America (SUNY Press, 2023), as well as co-edited volumes, Indigenous Interfaces: Spaces, Technology, and Social Networks in Mexico and Central America (University of Arizona Press, 2019), Hemispheric Blackness and the Exigencies of Accountability (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022), and Améfrica in Letters: Literary Interventions from Mexico to the Southern Cone (Vanderbilt University Press, 2022). She is working on a new book -- tentatively titled Indigenous Sovereignty Media and the Struggle to Possess the Means of Representation -- that began as a virtual summer 2022 Senior Research Fellowship with the Temporal Communitites RA5: "Building Digital Communities" at the Freie Universität Berlin.

She came to UNT with more than 18 years of teaching experience at the college level, along with a history of service to the profession, and life experiences that include internships at the UNECE in Geneva, Switzerland, and the UNDP in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. In her free time, she enjoys cheering for her boys at their Little League games and listening to true crime podcasts.