Vanessa de Veritch Woodside is an Associate Professor of Spanish Languages and Cultures in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences and the Executive Director of the Office of Global Affairs at the University of Washington Tacoma, where she teaches courses in Spanish and Latin American and Latinx Studies. Her research focuses more broadly on the subversive power of voice and storytelling in Latinx and borderlands literature and vis-à-vis oral histories of local immigrant and refugee communities. Her community-engaged research includes collaborative projects with formerly detained immigrants and their families. These projects help to document psychosocial effects of displacement, detention, and deportation on individuals affected by immigration and also enable partner organizations to improve and expand their services. She is the award-winning author of Ripped Apart: Unsettling Narratives of Transnational Migration (Texas Tech UP, 2021).

De Veritch Woodside is a recipient of the 2026 Digital Humanities Summer Fellowship for the project, "Latine/x Legacies in Tacoma and the South Puget Sound: An Interactive, Interdisciplinary, and Accessible Digital Platform." This project will develop of a user-friendly, dynamic, and aesthetically pleasing interactive digital platform to showcase the rich diversity of histories and experiences of Latine/x communities of Tacoma and the South Sound. It will focus on documenting the 20th and 21st-century grassroots efforts that culminated in the creation and expansion of community resources and the community-building and organizing in connection with the Northwest ICE Processing Center.