Rosina Lozano has a particular interest in Latino cities in the United States and has enjoyed taking an active role in the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities, which has enhanced her research and teaching of this topic.  

Lozano's doctoral training at the University of Southern California under the guidance of Los Angeles historians George Sánchez and Bill Deverell fostered her enduring interest in historically-Latino cities. Viewing the more recent demographic changes to cities along the East Coast has deepened her interest in how Latinos shape the urban experience more broadly. She explores both phenomena in her undergraduate and graduate courses at Princeton. 

Prof. Lozano teaches courses in the history department—including an upper division undergraduate history course, Latino Urban History, which investigates the history of Latinos in the cities of Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Miami. Lozano uses the urban environment as a way to better understand Latinos as a whole. It is in these urban spaces that different Latino national groups frequently interact and support each other’s community interests. They also at times clash in these spaces and jockey for their own community’s benefits. Aside from comparing national origins, the course also looks at the constantly shifting understandings of race, gender, immigration status, and class as related to Latinos. 

Lozano's first book, An American Language: The History of Spanish in the United States (University of California Press, 2018), is a political history of the Spanish language in the United States from the incorporation of the Mexican cession in 1848 through World War II, with some discussion of the following decades and present-day concerns. Lozano is working on a second book, tentatively titled Intertwined Roots: Mexican Americans and Native Americans in the Southwest, which tells the story of the ever-changing relationship between Mexican Americans and Native peoples from 1848 through the 1970s.

Lozano teaches a graduate seminar in the history department on Comparative Race and Ethnicity in the United States, which includes a significant focus on inter-ethnic and cross-racial interactions in urban settings across the United States. At Princeton, Lozano is associated with the Program in Latino Studies, the Program in American Studies (where she is a member of the Executive Committee), the Program in Latin American Studies, the Princeton-Mellon Urban Studies Program, and the PIIRS-sponsored Migration: People and Cultures Across Borders research group. 

Lozano joined the Princeton faculty in 2013 and has taught courses including: Becoming Latino in the U.S. (Latino History); Urban Latino History; Borderlands, Border Lives; Comparative Race and Ethnicity in the United States; History 500; and a History 400 course called Sound, Immigrants and the American West. She plans to teach courses on: the history of immigration and migration; the undocumented; and race, empire, and education in upcoming semesters. Lozano is a faculty adviser in Whitman College and won the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award in 2019.