Gregory Lee Cuéllar
Gregory L. Cuéllar's research explores topics related to the U.S. Mexico-Borderlands, immigration detention (UK and US), and the intersections of orientalism, the Bible and museums. He has been a visiting scholar at the Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society and the Centre for Criminology at the University of Oxford.
Subjects: Museum and Heritage Studies , Religion, Sociology
Biography
As a biblical scholar, Gregory L. Cuéllar has spent much of his career not just exploiting the creative ambiguities of the disciplinary borderlands but crossing them as well. Much of his research represents a commitment to disciplinary interference, focusing on topics like migration and the Bible, national museums and orientalism, immigration detention and religion, migrant art and biblical poetry. He has been a visiting scholar at the Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society (COMPAS) and the Centre for Criminology at the University of Oxford.He is author of Voices of Marginality: Exile and Return in Second Isaiah 40-55 and the Mexican Immigrant Experience (Peter Lang Publishing, 2008), Empire, the British Museum, and the Making of the Biblical Scholar in the Nineteenth Century: Archival Criticism (Palgrave, 2019), and Resacralizing the Other at the US-Mexico Border: A Borderland Hermeneutic (Routledge, 2020).
In terms of advocacy work, he is the co-founder of a refugee artwork project called, Arte de Lágrimas (Art of Tears): Refugee Artwork Project. This project is a traveling art exhibit and archive that aims to create greater public awareness of the lived migratory journeys of asylum-seeking children, youth, and adults.
Education
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PhD, Brite Divinity School, Texas Christian University
Books
Articles
Deportation as a sacrament of the state: the religious instruction of contracted chaplains in U.S. detention facilities
Published: Dec 20, 2017 by Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
Authors: Cuéllar, Gregory L.
Subjects:
Religion, Sociology
From a meta-narrative vantage point, the concentrated flows of asylum seekers from Central America to the United States have spawned a new era of detention and deportation religiosity. Amid the amorphous complexity of the present U.S. immigration context, religion can be found at the intersections of the coercive arm of the state and the private-detention industry.