MEMORIAL RESOLUTION                                                  SenD#4847
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                                 Lora Romero
                                 (1960-1997)

A native Californian, Lora Romero was born in Chino in 1960.  She graduated 
from Stanford and earned her master's and doctoral degrees from the University 
of California, Berkeley.  Before coming to Stanford in 1993, Professor Romero 
had taught at Princeton University and at the University of Texas at Austin. 
She was a specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American fiction, 
the American Renaissance, American Studies generally, gender theory, and 
Chicana/o cultural studies.  On October 10, 1997, Lora Romero took her own 
life.  She was thirty-seven years old.

Professor Romero's scholarship embraced the canonic authors of the American 
Renaissance and the African American and Chicana authors who challenged the 
canon.  One of her most probing essays, published in the Yale Journal of 
Criticism (1993), discussed the role of "ethnic intellectuals" in American 
institutions of higher learning.  By addressing what makes something worthy of 
studying, teaching, talking and writing about, the article seeks to understand 
the relation between a scholar's community of origin and the community of 
learning she inhabits.  By bridging the ethical dimension of social life and 
the classroom, Professor Romero's scholarship attempted to throw light on the 
links between one's professional and political commitments, particularly the 
status of women and minorities in the academy.  She did not live to see the 
publication of her first book, Home Fronts:  Domesticity and Its Critics in 
the Antebellum United States (Duke University Press, 1997), a study of classic 
American novelists and less frequently studied popular women writers of that 
period.  Concise, accessible and profound, Home Fronts has been greeted by 
scholars and students of American studies as an incisive analysis of the 
implications of the "separate spheres" theory of American women's and men's 
culture that has dominated critical discourse since the nineteenth century.

Professor Romero was the recipient of numerous prizes, including a Ford 
Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship and the prestigious Forester Prize awarded 
for the best article published in American literature in 1991.  Professor 
Romero played a key role in the American Studies Association.  She served as a 
member of the National Council;, the Minority Scholars Committee, the 1996 
Program Committee, and the Electronic Projects and Publications Committee.  In 
her election statement for the National Council, Professor Romero articulated 
her vision for the Association as interdisciplinary, critically multicultural 
and transnational, with a greater commitment to lesbian and gay studies as 
well.  She called upon American Studies to assume leadership in the arena of 
cultural studies "by problematizing the simple and self-congratulatory 
equation of equal representation and equal rights."

At Stanford, Professor Romero was a member of the Chicano Task Force, served 
on the Advisory Committee of the Gay/Lesbian/Bi-Sexual Center, and was 
resident fellow at Casa Zapata, the Chicano theme dormitory.  

As an assistant professor, a resident fellow at Casa Zapata, a generous 
colleague, and a devoted mentor of numerous undergraduate and graduate 
students, Professor Romero touched the lives of many members of the Stanford 
community.  The extraordinary care that she showed for friends, students and 
colleagues made her a central presence in the department and will make her 
absence profoundly felt.  Those who were fortunate to know her personally, as 
well as those who knew her only through her leadership and her ideas, miss her 
warmth, wit, and passion, her canny intelligence and her urgent, incisive 
political convictions.

Lora Romero is survived by her parents, Alice and George Romero of San 
Anselmo, two brothers, a sister, and hundreds of students, colleagues, and 
devoted friends.  Colleagues at Stanford and Texas have established 
scholarship funds in her memory.  In Stanford's Department of English, the 
Lora Romero Memorial Fund will support Chicano and Chicana literary studies.  
Home Fronts ensures that her work will live on through future generations of 
scholars and teachers of American studies.

                                              Committee:

                                                Ramon Saldivar, Chair
                                                Sharon Holland
                                                Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano