MA. Ohio University. PhD, The University of Georgia. Special interests include ethnic and racial representation in 20th- and 21st-century Latin American literature, performance, and film. Her current research analyzes how early 20th-century Black intellectuals of the Andean region reshaped ideas of nation and national identity and how contemporary Latin American writers and artists of color continue to redefine geographic and symbolic borders. Her most recent article, “Ecuadorian Blackness and the Poetics of Resistance and Solidarity in Juyungo by Adalberto Ortiz,” published in The Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, won the 2022 Dolores Cacuango Award for Best Article in the Ecuadorian Studies Section at the Latin American Studies Association. SLC, 2022–
Undergraduate Courses 2022-2023
Spanish
Beginning Spanish
Open, Seminar—Spring
This course further develops Spanish language competence through cultural topics of the Hispanic World. The course is organized into three content units, in which students will reflect in Spanish about themselves in connection with cities: Who are you in connection to the city? How does the city connect with you? What does the city remember? In order to answer these questions, students will engage with authentic materials such as visual arts, songs, movies, and texts of different genres that will focus on comprehension, contextualization, reflection, and the creation of new meaning. Each unit will end with a small individual and group project that will involve the creation of different media or texts using the knowledge and linguistic skills acquired. At the end of this course, students will have gained an understanding of the language, in a range of genres, of diverse aspects of Spanish-speaking cultures.
Faculty
Latin American Literature Through Black Latinidad
Advanced, Seminar—Spring
Prerequisite: permission of the instructor
This course offers an overview of contemporary Latin American writers through the lens of Black Latinidad, as proposed by cultural critic Lorgia García-Peña. García-Peña situates Black Latinidad as a site that both questions racial and national identity as forms of exclusion and allows for productive knowledge-making. With that concept in mind, we will examine short stories, poetry, essays, performance, and film produced by Black writers and artists from the late 19th to the 21st century in dialogue with local, national, and diasporic discourses such as Indigenism, Hispanism, Negritudé, Multiculturalism, and Latinidad. In discussing these texts, we will focus on the authors’ strategic use of language and their epistemological contributions that result from their critical engagement with their particular social, political, and historical realities.