Hector Carrillo

Héctor Carrillo is professor of sociology and gender & sexuality studies at Northwestern University, where he also co-directs the Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN). Carrillo is the author of two award winning books: The Night Is Young: Sexuality in Mexico in the Time of AIDS (University of Chicago Press, 2002) and Pathways of Desire: The Sexual Migration of Mexican Gay Men (University of Chicago Press, 2017). His second book earned him awards from three separate American Sociological Association (ASA) sections, and it has been selected to receive the 2020 ASA Distinguished Scholarly Book Award.

Prof. Carrillo’s current research focuses on the appeal of amateur genealogy as a global phenomenon. He examines the social and economic processes that put documents and records—the material basis and essential building blocks of genealogy—at the fingertips of amateur genealogists worldwide, as well as genealogists’ practices of documentary analysis and interpretation. By virtue of broadened access to documents once monopolized by states, churches, and corporations, amateur genealogists productively confer on them a new life, an afterlife, turning them into tools for recreating the past, interpreting the present, and imagining better futures.

Photo Credit: Steven Epstein