Dr. Sarah Montoya is a queer Mexican-American settler working at the intersection of Settler Colonial Studies, Critical Geographies, and Critical Information and Infrastructure Studies. She earned a Ph.D. in Gender Studies at UCLA. Her manuscript-in-progress, Electronic Empires and Digital Domains, examines representations and material histories of telecommunications development in the U.S. through the lens of settler colonial studies.
Act in Solidarity
Decolonization, or the return of land to its Indigenous, ancestral kin and relations, is necessary. Learn more about the Return of Tc’ih-Léh-Dûñ to the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council and the return of 969 acres of ancestral land to the Rappahannock Tribe. To think about how to negotiate our ongoing occupation of Native land, learn about The Shuumi Land Tax. Returning the land and repairing relations is possible.
Current Work
Sarah is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Co-Director at Virginia Commonwealth University’s new Indigenous Humanities Lab. The Lab “serves as a collaborative hub for advancing Indigenous scholarship, pedagogy, and community engagement at VCU and beyond.” Read more here.
Previous Work
From 2023-2025, Sarah served as a Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow on the Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail where she revised interpretive materials and created training and outreach materials to support tribal engagement along the 1200 mile historic corridor. The position allowed her to direct resources towards tribal-led educational and cultural programming.
At UCLA, Sarah focused on digital mapping and digital explorations of race, space, and the law in the US and Canada and developed experience as a curator, researcher, site designer, and programmer on a variety of public humanities projects. She worked with Dr. Mishuana Goeman (Tonawanda Band of Seneca) on Mapping Indigenous LA and Carrying Our Ancestors Home and worked with Dr. Sherene Razack on launching The Racial Violence Hub and Race and Deaths in Custody.
Before attending UCLA, Sarah received a Bachelor of Arts in Women’s Studies, English, and a Master’s in English from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her Master’s thesis “Queer (Cyber) Spaces: Representations of Queer Subjectivities in Queer Digital Communities,” examines how online citizenship is shaped through site interfaces and how this impacts (re)presentations of queer identities online. She remains honored to be UTSA’s first Women’s Studies graduate. Her Honor’s Thesis entitled, “’No se raje, Chicanita’: An Exploration of Identity Politics, Social Scripts, and Power Negotiations in Latina Authors’ Youth Literature,” explores Latina-authored youth literature and the politics of visual representation in children’s books.