His current book project, State Deformations: Culture and the Politics of Life in El Salvador, traces the practices of peoplehood, community formation, and everyday life-making amongst varied groups in El Salvador since the end of the Salvadoran Civil War. This work explores the quotidian modes of living, thinking, and being produced by historical inequality, the postwar Salvadoran state, and by structural shifts in the transnational system. A multi-sited study, Cuéllar's research examines the cultural and political strategies employed by in-country Salvadorans that, despite living in conditions of extreme marginality, economic abandonment and routine violence, engage in practices of refusal, survivance and critique that motion towards restored and dignified social futures.

Cuéllar's writing has appeared in American Indian Culture and Research Journal, The Journal of Cultural Economy, Comparative American Studies, Revue française d’études américaines, Soccer & Society, Diálogo: An Interdisciplinary Studies Journal, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, and is forthcoming in Latino Studies, Political Geography, and others. His public essays and columns can be found in El Faro, NACLA, Social Text's Periscope, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Radical History Review's The Abusable Past.

He is currently appointed Mellon Faculty Fellow in Latin American, Latino & Caribbean Studies where he will transition to Assistant Professor in 2021.