Alexis Baldacci is Assistant Professor of History at Rockford University. She earned her PhD in Latin American History from the University of Florida in 2018, where her work was recognized by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Dissertation Fellowship, the Rothman Doctoral Fellowship in the Humanities, and the Linda Vance Award in Women’s History. Prior to returning to home to Illinois to teach at RU, she taught at Bates and Colby Colleges in Maine and Lyon College in Arkansas. Her research and teaching focus on questions of citizenship, power, and equity.

In 2021, she published an article, "A Little Bit of Magic: Nitza Villapol, the Cuban Diet, and the Socialist State, 1959-1983," in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, and she has a chapter on Cold War fashions among Cuban youth in the forthcoming edited volume, Engendering Revolution. Her current book project, I, the Revolution: Austerity, Identity, and Desire in Cuba, 1971-1991, examines the nature of political participation in Cuba and the popular legitimacy of the revolutionary project through analysis of consumer and material culture. Her findings indicate that the consumer economy was a crucial arena where state and citizen interacted on a daily level and in which state representatives and average citizens used austerity, access to goods and services, and everyday needs to make claims on one another. Her work has particular salience for understanding the state-led women’s liberation movement in Cuba and the ability of oppositional voices to counteract the totalizing impulses of state communism.