María Luisa Amado is a Lincoln Financial Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Guilford College, where she has been teaching sociology and Latinx and Latin American Studies since 2002. A Panamanian, she came to the United States as a Fulbright Scholar to pursue graduate studies in sociology at Emory University. As the end of her studies approached, María decided that teaching at a small liberal arts college, guided by an explicit social justice vision, best fit her identity as a sociologist. Guilford College offered her such an opportunity. Since 2002, María has worked with hundreds of students and collaborated with her colleagues in standing and ad hoc committees to support and project Guilford's mission. 

Given the nature and content of her classes, María draws on her research and lived experience as a Panamanian and an immigrant to nurture students' rapport and render a textured image of Latin American and immigrant realities. Her courses are constantly refreshed and replenished by her yearly visits to Panama, where María has family and maintains cultural and community ties. Central to María's educational vision is enhancing students' global awareness and appreciation of the human stories behind the tapestry of global networks and processes. She invites students to bring their voices to the classroom and prompts them to think critically about their location in the social structure and the intersections of their personal choices with social change processes. 

In addition to teaching, María takes pleasure in research. She has conducted fieldwork in the U.S. and Panama and published and presented her work to diverse audiences. In 2006, she published Mexican Immigrants in the Labor Market: The Strength of Strong Ties, which focuses on how undocumented Mexican immigrants use their co-ethnic networks to navigate the challenges of a new, often hostile labor market. She has published articles on such topics as the various meanings attached to mestizaje (racial mixing), generational changes in how Panamanians remember the 1989 military invasion of Panama, and personal narratives of the pandemic. Her latest research focuses on the dislodgement of informal street vendors from their traditional selling stations in Panama City due to gentrifying processes coded as "urban revitalization." After extensive field research, she co-produced a film, "Bien Cuidao: The Informal Economics of Survival in Panama," shown several times at Guilford College and at the State University of North Carolina in Raleigh. Her forthcoming book, Neoliberalism and Labor Displacement in Panama: Contested Public Space and the Disenfranchisement of Street Vendors, is expected to be out in the first months of 2024. 

María is also an amateur photographer who has shared her photographic work in collective exhibits at Guilford and on her webpage, Flickering Stories of the Road. She likes reading, creative non-fiction writing, watching political thrillers, historical movies, and science fiction films, and walking with her husband Joe in Greensboro's many gorgeous parks.