Honora Spicer

Honora Spicer is a place-based educator, poet, literary translator, and Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at Harvard University. She researches US/Mexico borderlands history, with an interest in migration, the carceral state, infrastructure and communication networks. Her research is supported by fellowships from the Huntington Library and Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, and she is a 2024-2025 Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative Doctoral Fellow. She holds a B.A. in History and English from Oxford University. 

Her dissertation, POST BOND: One Square Mile in El Paso, TX, 1848-1971, is a long study of the formation of federal space at the current site of an ICE detention center, a NASA office, an airport runway, and an air mail facility. In conversation with borderlands history, urban studies, and histories of the settler state, her research addresses relationships between democracy and empire, and the role of understudied state agencies in border formation.

Her public history engagements use critical cartography and counter-mapping in experiential teaching. She has taught at El Paso Community College, where she was also a faculty fellow with the Mellon Humanities Collaborative. She taught with expedition-based learning programs for five years. 

An advocate of bilingual learning and literature, she is part of the leadership of Cardboard House Press and organizes Spanish-bilingual poetry readings and bookmaking workshops with Cartonera Collective and des/centro de poesía in Providence, RI. Her essays and literary translations have appeared in The Boston Review, Pesapalabra, Asymptote, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her commentary series in Jacket2, ‘Architectures of Disappearance,’ addresses poetry that confronts physical and linguistic architectures of movement constriction. 

Photo Credit: Giancarlo Huapaya, Harvard Map Collection, 2023.