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- M.A. and Ph.D. in Spanish University of California, Riverside, 2014, 2020
- B.A. in Spanish and Public Health Policy, University of California, Irvine, 2010
Dissertation
Reimagining Transatlantic Iberian Conquests in Postcolonial Narratives and Rewriting Spaces of Resistance, 2020
Presentations
Memories of Fire and Water in a Qasida Morisca and Radwa Ashour’s Granada Trilogy. 5/7/22
Roundtable Topic: How do crises that provoke displacements shape literary cultural and artistic expressions?; Crisis and Displacement: The Mediterranean Seminar Spring 2022 Workshop at Rutgers University-Newark
Rewriting Against Erasures of Conquest in The Moor’s Account 5/23-26/2018, Session Title: Re-reading Spaces and Re-contextualizing Oral/Aural Narratives: Identities, Erasures and Belonging through Performance Latin American Studies Association (LASA) 2018 Congress in Barcelona, Spain
Writing Out of the Shadow in The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami 10/21/2016, UC Davis 12th Annual Samuel G. Armistead Graduate Student Colloquium in Latin American and Peninsular Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, “Crossing the Lines: Artistic and Linguistic Transgression, Transformation and Intersection
Economías en Competencia: Melibea y Celestina en la Obra de Fernando de Rojas 3/5/2016 The American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP)- Roger Anton Conference on Portuguese & Hispanic Languages and Literatures, Chapter Conference at CSU Fullerton
Conquest through the Kaleidoscope: Reading and Writing Men, Women and Monsters in José María Merino’s Crónicas Mestizas 4/15/2016, UCR 10th Annual Hispanic Studies Graduate Student Conference, “Bodies in Fugue: Migration, What it Makes (And Unmakes)”
Images of Futures Past: Mixed Mediums and Mythologies of Modern Storytelling in Darren Aronofsky’s “The Fountain” 4/18/2015, UCR 9th Annual Hispanic Studies Graduate Student Conference, “Beyond Technophilia and – Phobia: Technology of and in Cultural Production”
La Representación de la Mujer como Sujeto y Objeto Económico en la Novela Misericordia de Galdós 10/17/2014, UC Davis 10th Annual Samuel G. Armistead Graduate Student Colloquium in Latin American and Peninsular Language, Literatures and Cultures
La Moneda y la Mujer: La representación de la mujer como sujeto económico y objeto económico en la novela decimonónica de Benito Pérez Galdós, Misericordia 5/25/2013, UCR 7th Annual Hispanic Studies Graduate Student Conference, “Time, Space, and the Imaginary: Acts of Juxtaposition, Appropriation and Subversion.”
Grants and Funding
- MLA Spring 2022 Professional Development Grant, 8/2022
- Departmental Grant for LASA in Barcelona, UCR Hispanic Studies, 5/ 2018
- The Middle Ages in the Wider World Project Kickoff at UC Berkeley, 3/2017
- GSA UCR Conference Grant, 10/ 2016
- Education Abroad Summer Program Scholarship, UCR International Affairs 7/2016
- Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellowship, UCR Graduate Division, 10/2012- 6/2013
I loved the experience of learning the Spanish language as a non-native Speaker growing up in southern California. The ability to access diverse cultures, histories, arts, literatures, musical traditions and human experiences is a gift and a source of joy I want my students to experience in their journey of learning the Spanish language with cultural humility. Ultimately, I hope to help my students engage in their own unique voice in the language and for every student to have a takeaway that they can connect to as an individual. I don’t believe in perfection. I strive for progress for all my students.
My research focuses on medieval and colonial imagery in contemporary media, specifically the re-imaginings of Iberian conquests and of Al-Andalus and Latin America in contemporary films and fiction. Amidst the epistemic erasures of Eurocentric historiography and coloniality, fiction can reinscribe the recentered perspectives of colonized, occupied and erased communities. These counter-writings reframe and interrogate tropes of coloniality in the past and present. I am also interested in translation studies, Islam in Ecocritical readings, Aljamía/Aljamiado Literature, Hybridity and Diaspora Studies.