Anneleise Azúa is a historian and ethnographer with fieldwork experience along the Texas-Mexico border and in Central Mexico. Her interests include plant medicine, botany, settler colonialism and race in the twentieth-century borderlands.    

Her book manuscript explores the ways humans, plants and the land create history and culture together. The book reveals the science of plant medicine and healing in Texas and Mexico and its complex relationship with the environment, colonialism and transnational understandings of race.

Azúa received her Ph.D. and M.A. in American studies from the University of Texas at Austin and her bachelor’s degree in communications and gender studies from the University of Southern California. She has held a Rising Scholar Postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Virginia, a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies (Anthropology) at the University of Houston, as well as a research EDUFI Fulbright Fellowship in the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki, Finland. From 2018-2020, she served as a curatorial fellow in the Division of Medicine and Science at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and in 2022, she published an article titled “Nuestra Ciencia as Transborder Ecological Knowledge and Survival” in the American Anthropological Association’s Culture, Agriculture, Food, and Environment (CAFÉ). 

In the Spring of 2025, she will be teaching a course titled “Latinx and Indigenous Environmentalisms” in the Department of American Studies. She is also working on a grant for a food project that investigates the rise of Tex-Mex food popularity in the Nordic countries.