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Bio

Grounded in a deep belief in the transformative power of art and the humanities to advance social justice and human rights, I am drawn to creative cultural production—literature, film, performance and the visual arts—as sites of resistance, where dominant culture is questioned and alternative visions of individual subjectivity and collective life articulated.

My research centers on race and ethnicity in Andean literature and culture, particularly on the place of indigenous and indigenous-mestizo peoples and cultures in Peruvian national discourse and identity. My first monograph, Creating the Hybrid Intellectual: Subject, Space, and the Feminine in the Narrative of José María Arguedas (Bucknell UP, 2007), is the first major English-language study of Latin America’s most important indigenista writer and examines ethnicity, gender and national discourse in this Peruvian author’s narrative fiction. My co-edited volume, Unfolding the City: Women Write the City in Latin America (U of Minnesota, 2007), gathers notable literary scholars to explore Latin American women writers’ portraits of urban life.

My second monograph, Andean Truths: Transitional Justice, Ethnicity, and Cultural Production in Post-Shining Path Peru (Liverpool UP, 2015), winner of the MLA’s Katherine Singer Kovacs prize, studies how literature and the arts challenge the dominant narrative of national peace and reconciliation in Peru, after two decades of civil war, as constructed by Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. My latest, forthcoming work, Yuyachkani’s Human Rights Theater: A Critical Anthology of Five Plays provides annotated translations, with scholarly introduction, of five plays in Spanish and Quechua by renowned Peruvian theater collective Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani.

A citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, my current projects include a multi-media exploration of Chickasaw storyteller Te Ata Thompson’s global travels (including a year in Pittsburgh while studying drama at Carnegie Tech in 1921 and a voyage to Peru in 1937), contemplating Te Ata’s development an early, organic, ethnographer, as well as a book-length study of transnational Quechua cultural networks and issues of global indigeneity.

Department Member Since 2020