Dr. Jennifer Gómez Menjívar's research interests include Indigenous Sovereignty Media, Latin American and Latinx Media, Grassroots and Participatory Media Practices, Cinematic Adaptation, Digital Culture, Critical Theory, and Media Linguistics. She holds a Ph.D. in Latin/x American Cultural Studies from The Ohio State University, and her scholarly training is in the production, circulation, and reception of texts, from traditional print to contemporary digital. For the last several years, her research has been concerned with how Indigenous and Black communities use new media to challenge the typical discussions of minority communities as disenfranchised and powerless. These projects are concerned with how phenomena like hashtag movements, TikTok journalism, YouTube videos, Twitter memes, and Facebook groups are increasingly necessary in concrete undertakings such as autonomy and self-governance, language revitalization, minority entrepreneurship, and grassroots organizing.

Her articles have appeared in venues such as the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, Applied Linguistics, Chasqui, Diálogo, Hispanófila, Romance Notes, Transmodernity, NAIS Journal, and Mesoamérica, among others. Her books include Tropical Tongues: Language Ideologies, Endangerment, and Minority Languages in Belize (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) and Black in Print: Plotting the Coordinates of Blackness in Central America (SUNY Press, 2023), as well as the edited volumes, Indigenous Interfaces: Spaces, Technology, and Social Networks in Mexico and Central America (University of Arizona Press, 2019), Hemispheric Blackness and the Exigencies of Accountability (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022), and Améfrica in Letters: Literary Interventions from Mexico to the Southern Cone (Vanderbilt University Press, 2022). She currently at work on a new book project, tentatively titled Indigenous Sovereignty Media and the Demand for the Means of Representation, that began with a May 2022 virtual Senior Research Fellowship with the Temporal Communities RA5: Building Digital Communities (Freie Universität Berlin).

At UNT, Dr. Gómez Menjívar is Director of the Spanish Language Media Certificate. In the 2022-2023 academic year, she is teaching "Global Media," "Seminar in Spanish Language Media," "Topics in Film and Television Studies: Superheroes," and "Media Auteurs: Luis Buñuel." In summer 2023, she is scheduled to teach Topics in Film and Television Studies: Animation.

She came to UNT with more than 18 years of teaching experience at the college level, a history of service to the profession, and life experiences that include internships at the UNECE in Geneva, Switzerland, and the UNDP in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. In her free time, she enjoys cheering for her boys at their Little League games and listening to true crime podcasts.