Carla Guerrón Montero is a cultural and applied anthropologist trained in the United States and Latin America and specialized in the anthropology of tourism, the anthropology of food, and the African diaspora. Professor Guerrón Montero is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Delaware, with joint appointments in Latin American and Iberian Studies, Africana Studies, and Women and Gender Studies. She received a Ph.D. degree in Cultural Anthropology and Latin American Studies from the University of Oregon, a Master of Arts degree in Applied Anthropology from Oregon State University (United States), and a Licenciatura degree in Socio-cultural Anthropology from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador (Quito-Ecuador)

Professor Guerrón Montero studies the complex and multiple meanings and representations of identity among marginalized populations in modern Latin American and Caribbean nation-states (Brazil, Ecuador, Grenada, and Panama). She is the author of The Color of the Panela: Study of Afro-Ecuadorian Women in the Afro-Ecuadorian Andes (Centro Cultural Afro-Ecuatoriano, 2000) and From Temporary Migrants to Permanent Attractions: Tourism, Cultural Heritage, and Afro-Antillean Identities in Panama (University of Alabama Press, 2020).  She is editor of Careers in Applied Anthropology: Advice from Academics and Practicing Anthropologists (NAPA, 2008) and co-editor of Why the World Needs Anthropologists (Routledge, 2020). In addition to authoring several book chapters, she has published in English and Spanish in professional journals such as Anthropological Quarterly, Bulletin for Latin American Research, Ethnology, Human Organization, the Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, and Ecology of Food and Nutrition, among others.  She currently serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology (JLACA).

Her research and studies have been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Fulbright, the Ford Foundation, the Inter-American Foundation, the Nippon Foundation (Japan), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the National Secretary for Higher Education, Science, and Technology (SENESCYT, Ecuador). She has been a fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York), Senior Researcher and Lecturer at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (Quito, Ecuador). Additionally, Professor Guerrón Montero has been a Visiting Researcher at the Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation’s (CEDLA) in Amsterdam (Netherlands); the Catalan Institute for Research on Cultural Patrimony (ICRPC) in Girona (Spain); the Museu Nacional of the Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil); the University of Ljubljana and Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU) in Ljubljana (Slovenia), and the Institut des Hautes Etudes de L’Amérique Latine IHEAL, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle 3 (France).