I think these are interesting as information for oneself as much or more than for others. I do not know that I would answer them in the same way every day, but these are some answers I might have.
1. How did you arrive at your dissertation topic or most recent project of considerable scope?
I notice literary texts or social phenomena and have flashes of insight about them that I do not fully understand or that are not complete interpretations, and I want to follow these insights through.
Then, projects arise from other projects.
2. If you could go back and teach your grad school self one important thing about reading/writing/teaching/etc. that you learned after grad school, what would it be?
My work is original, valuable, mine, and also good. It is not just passable, it is something people want to see. That and not survival should be the reason to do it.
Also: it is not true what they tell you in graduate school, that teaching does not matter / that you should not put time into it. I may wish this were true, but it is not.
3. What aspect of being a professional scholar and teacher do you find most difficult?
Not working in a place that has a research culture.
Also: not being in the discipline(s) that most interest me; it takes energy to repress those interests and to emphasize the ones I need to for my job. That is what makes not being in places that support the discipline I am in doubly hard.
4. What do you like most about being a professional scholar and teacher?
Research, which in my view includes teaching upper division and graduate courses.
5. What kinds of things do you do to maintain your intellectual curiosity?
It doesn’t need maintenance, it is endless. I have spent a lot of time trying to control it — to be less intellectually curious, less challenging and more conformist. To this purpose I have used sleep deprivation, exercise deprivation, deprivation of recreation and rest generally, deprivation of changes in scenery, and a few legal drugs. Now I am just trying to channel it into a single project, and controlling the boundless energy with a stepped-up exercise program.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I think it’s a real pity you have to trim your wings.
So do I.
What field do you want to be in?
Law! I wanted to do the B.S. in Economics and do radical political economy! Then go on to law school, to work on the global prison industrial complex! I think I would have to have an academic position in Law and LAS to do this the way I want to. I was going to actually quit academia after 4th year review or so, and do this, and I could have done, then, but got guilt tripped out of it by family and academics who said how can you leave the humanities, etc., and I ended up swallowing this bait, which was a bad idea. It is not that I am not interested in this, it is just that I would only be really interested if I could practice it at a high level, as one can in real research departments, and since I can’t do that and at the same time it is not my top interest, it becomes heavy. Current book project is supposed to bridge the gap, though.
Most Latin Americanists I know want to do something that’s not literary criticism per se. So is it a problem to be have a broader notion of one’s field? Maybe you fit in with the field better than you think? You can do what you want from your current discipline.
Well — yes and no — or yes to a certain extent, but it is that legal education and law license I would love to have! But here’s a goal: more conferences like the one a couple of weeks ago which was a sociology-and-law conference, this will start giving some of the lacking context although not the lacking powers.