We are very pleased to welcome Prof. Marion Christina Rohrleitner, PhD, as a guest lecturer at the Institute of American Studies during the summer semester of 2021.
Marion Christina Rohrleitner (PhD in English, University of Notre Dame) is Associate Professor of English and affiliate faculty in the African American, Chicana/o, and Women's and Gender Studies Programs at The University of Texas at El Paso, where she researches and teaches twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literatures with special attention to Chicanx and Latinx literatures and cultures, Caribbean diasporic literature, comparative literature of the Americas, and world literature.
Her interdisciplinary collection, Dialogues Across Diasporas: Women Writers, Scholars, and Activists of Africana and Latina Descent in Conversation, co-edited with Sarah E. Ryan, was published by Lexington Books in December 2012. Haitian Revolutionary Fictions, co-authored and co-edited with Marlene L. Daut and Gregory Pierrot, is dedicated to the translation and contextualization of French, German, Kreyol, Portuguese, Spanish, English and US-American responses to the Haitian Revolution published between 1787 and 1899 (forthcoming with the University of Virginia Press in early November 2021). Dr. Rohrleitner is currently completing Transnational Latinidades, a monograph focused on theorizing and analyzing the politics and poetics of translating contemporary Latinx literatures in the European Union. Her scholarship has also been published in American Quarterly, Antípodas, Callaloo, El Mundo Zurdo, Latino Studies, MELUS, The European Journal of American Studies, and The Oxford Bibliographies in Latino Studies. Examples of recent scholarly essays are "Refusing the Referendum: Queer Latino Masculinities and Utopian Citizenship in Justin Torres’ We the Animals" and "Undocumented Magic: Magical Realism as ‘Aesthetic Turbulence’ in Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper." Her next book project looks at poetry and performance art in the US/Mexico borderlands as an expression of "radical hope" in response to environmental injustice, dehumanizing immigration policies, and historical amnesia concerning US-foreign policy in Central America.
Marion Rohrleitner is teaching two classes this semester: ENP.02036UB “Cultural Studies Seminar (Altermundos/Other Worlds: Afrofuturism, Latinx Gothic, and the Speculative Mode as Cultural Resistance in Literature and Film)“ and 512.225 “Specialized Topics in Anglophone Literary Studies (“Outsiders”/“Descartados” in Chicanx Literature).” We are happy to have her with us and thank her for sharing her expertise with students and faculty members.