WHO WE ARE

Jorge Coronado is President of AAUP-AFT United Academics Local 6741 and Treasurer of Northwestern University’s chapter of the AAUP (NUAAUP). In 2018, he co-founded NUAAUP and served as its inaugural president for six years. In that role and subsequently, he has worked diligently to bolster academic freedom, realize faculty governance, and establish ties across campus workers. His service in Local 6741 has been both an extension of this work and an opportunity to learn from higher ed’s wide variety of institutions and challenges. Most recently, and in good company, he has dedicated his energies to the resurgence of unionism and organizing in higher ed.

He is also Professor of Modern Latin American and Andean Literatures and Cultures at Northwestern, where he is currently Director of Latin American & Caribbean Studies and Director of the Andean Cultures and Histories working group. He is the author of The Andes Imagined: Indigenismo, Society, and Modernity (2009) and Portraits in the Andes: Photography and Agency, 1900-1950 (2018). He co-edited Visiones de los Andes. Ensayos críticos sobre el concepto de paisaje y región (2019), Anarquismos y marxismos en Bolivia, Ecuador y Peru. Textos esenciales (2023; expanded second edition 2025), Archaeology and Its Avatars: Science and Culture in Latin America (2026), and Arqueología y sus avatares (forthcoming). He has won funding from the NEH, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin, and the American Philosophical Society, among others. At Northwestern, he has been active in building the Department of Spanish & Portuguese and the Program in Latin American & Caribbean Studies. He served as Chair of the former (2010-2017), oversaw its renovation, and inaugurated its doctoral program. In 2021, he assumed the responsibilities of Series Editor for Illuminations: Cultural Formations of the Americas at the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Matthew Thomas Miller is Assistant Professor of Persian Literature & Digital Humanities at Roshan Institute for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland (UMD). In 2020, he helped re-establish University of Maryland’s AAUP chapter—now named the United Academics of Maryland-UMD—after nearly a decade of dormancy and has played a leading role in building the chapter since, including now serving as its Secretary and co-lead on the political campaign in Annapolis to secure collective bargaining rights for higher ed faculty in Maryland’s four-year public institutions. He is passionate about academic labor and organizing with faculty and graduate workers to protect higher education for the common good. His academic research focuses on Sufism, Persian literature, history of sexuality, the body, and affect/emotion in the Islamic world, digital humanities, and the literary and political writings—especially of the utopian variety—of twentieth-century Iranian revolutionaries. He also serves as the Director of the Roshan Initiative in Persian Digital Humanities (PersDig@UMD) and as the co-PI for the multi-institutional Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI). He has received generous funding for these projects from The Mellon Foundation, The National Endowment for the Humanities, The National Science Foundation, The Roshan Cultural Heritage Foundation, and The Islamic Manuscript Association. In his spare time, he enjoys running, biking, hiking, and hanging out with his partner and two—very wild—little children.

Heather Ferguson is an Associate Professor of Middle East and Ottoman History at Claremont McKenna College. Her research focus is on the early modern Ottoman Empire and analyzes mechanisms for defining and governing difference in hybrid sovereign and territorial environments and on discourses of law and power. She helped found the Claremont Consortium AAUP chapter in 2020 and has served as executive committee member, President, and now VP in advocating for contingent faculty, library staff bargaining rights, surveillance and protest policies, and unfair labor practices  Heather has worked to defend the academic freedom and free speech of AAUP-AFT members within institutional dynamics that have historically outsourced power to governing boards and donors. This is all the more urgent as–across partisan divides–local, state, and federal actors have targeted efforts of academic workers in higher education to organize and mobilize for the common good. Heather’s organizing work focuses on coalition building across various divides, whether between professional organizations and national unions, between K12 and higher ed educators, or across sectors that bridge out from academic spaces into alliances with community organizations. Along with other members of the AAUP-AFT United Academics slate she believes that what we have been doing is no longer enough and we must build collective wall-to-wall collective action to fight institutionalized hierarchies of power and representation in whatever form they appear.

Bethany Letiecq is currently serving as the vice-president of AAUP-AFT United Academics Local 6741. She is Professor of Research Methods and co-founder of the Anti-Racist and Decolonizing Research Collaborative in the College of Education and Human Development at George Mason University (GMU). Prior to joining GMU’s faculty, she worked at Montana State University where she helped to organize their first faculty union, the Associated Faculty of MSU affiliated with MEA-MFT. In 2012-2013, she also served on AFT’s Higher Education Program and Policy Council. In 2013, she joined the faculty of GMU, and in 2016, she worked to revitalize and grow GMU’s AAUP chapter, serving as president from 2016-2021, and again from 2025 to present. She also serves on GMU’s Faculty Senate, previously chairing the Faculty Matters committee and serving on the Faculty Senate Executive Committee and Grievance Committee. After working alongside the student-led Transparent GMU and UnKoch My Campus to expose undue donor influence at Mason, she then served on the GMU Gift Acceptance Policy Committee, where she worked with faculty and administrators to revise GMU’s policy and advance greater donor transparency. In 2021, she also co-founded the George Mason University Coalition for Worker Rights, which aims to build a wall-to-wall union and better the working conditions of all workers on campus. As part of the Coalition, she fought most recently alongside SEIU32BJ and custodial workers, the majority of whom were Central American immigrant women who were experiencing wage theft, intimidation, retaliation, and poor working conditions at Mason. 

In addition to campus organizing efforts, from 2018-2021, she served as member-at-large of the Virginia Conference of the AAUP, as president from 2022-2024, and currently is on the executive committee. She has also served on several national AAUP search committees and in 2022-2023 served on the AAUP/AFT Partnership Implementation and Coordination Team. She lives in Northern Virginia with her partner, children, and Reyna, the family pooch.