Nic Flores is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Latina/Latino Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He specializes in public and sexual health, HIV/AIDS prevention, ethnography, comparative ethnic and racial studies, and gender and sexuality studies with additional interests in queer of color critique, disability studies, and feminist science and technology studies.
Dr. Flores earned his Ph.D. in Comparative Studies with certificates in Latina/o Studies and Sexuality Studies from The Ohio State University in 2019. He also holds an M.A. in Comparative Studies from The Ohio State University and B.A. in Anthropology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from DePauw University. Previously, Dr. Flores was a Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies and Latina/o Studies at Kenyon College. His scholarship has appeared in Latino Studies and The Journal of Visual Inquiry: Learning and Teaching Art, as well as been featured in several local news and popular academic outlets.
Dr. Flores is currently working on two projects. The first is his book manuscript, tentatively titled Becoming HIV-Negative (under contract with the University of Minnesota Press), based on his interdisciplinary dissertation research in central Ohio. He investigates the relationship between a newly introduced biomedical HIV prevention medication known as pre-exposure prophylaxis (“PrEP”) and its effects on minoritized communities in local, everyday settings. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in a mid-sized Midwestern city, his work illustrates how the material, political, and affective work that HIV prevention technologies are leveraged for manifest and emerge from contested histories of racialization and sexualization. Additionally, Dr. Flores attends to PrEP’s proliferation in people’s lives and to the reconfiguration of what types of intimacy, pleasure, and affective registers are made available through HIV prevention work.
Dr. Flores is a co-Principal Investigator on an Ohio State University campus-wide grant (2020-21) titled the Transformative Access Project (TAP). The aim of TAP is to re-imagine “access” as a collective and deliberate process that centers race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class. He is leading the efforts to have their work compiled and published.