CLS Faculty leads discussion of the film "Sleep Dealer"

Wed, March 26, 2025 12:00 PM at

The Ubuntu International Film Series hosted by MSU Libraries and the Global Studies in the Arts and Humanities Program present the film "Sleep Doctor" with discussion lead by Dr. Sheila Contreras (CLS and English).

Sleep Dealer is a science-fiction set on the U.S. / Mexico border that tells the story of Memo Cruz (Luis Fernando Peña), a young man from Mexico who dreams of coming to the United States. However, in this brave new borderland, crossing is impossible, and Memo ‘migrates’ in a new way — over the net. By connecting his body to the net Memo controls a machine that performs his labor in America, sending his pure work without the body of the worker.

Dr. Sheila Contreras is associate professor in the Department of English. Contreras was Director of MSU’s Chicano/Latino Studies Program and Associate Dean for DEI and Curriculum in the College of Arts & Letters.  Her recent essays (“The Spanish-Indian Binary and Anti-Blackness as Literary Inheritance”) appear in Latinx Literature in Transition, 1848-1992 (Cambridge UP, 2025) and in Sociology of Race & Ethnicity. Her monograph, Blood Lines: Myth, Indigenism and Chicana/o Literature (University of Texas Press), received Honorable Mention for the Modern Language Association Annual Prize in Chicana/o and Latina/o Literary Studies. Additional research and teaching interests include Women’s literatures, Young Adult literatures and modern American literature more broadly. Her latest project investigates the relationship between curriculum and achievement in Latinx undergraduate education.