Erika Almenara

Dr. Erika Almenara is Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, the Latin American and Latino Program Associate Director at the University of Arkansas, and a Fulbright Senior Scholar. She received her Ph.D. in Romance Languages & Literatures (Spanish) from the University of Michigan in 2015. Her research interests include 20th and 21st century Latin American cultural production especially in the cases of subaltern/marginalized subjects and communities. At the University of Arkansas, she teaches courses on Queer/Cuir Theory, masculinity, the intersection between politics and aesthetics, gender, race, and creative writing.

She has published in peer-reviewed journals such as Letras Femeninas, Revista Iberoamericana, Hispanofila, Dissidences and Hispanic Journal of Theory and Criticism. Dr. Almenara’s book, The Language of the In-Between. Travestis, Post-hegemoy, and Writing in Contemporary Chile and Peru was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in October of 2022. It locates alternate cultural productions that stake a claim for the emergence of a language capable of exposing and transforming marginalization and oppression, a language that critiques the formation of modern nation-states and modern national identity in subordination and exclusion, an act that was initiated in the 19th century and resumed by the military dictatorship in the case of Chile and the presidency of Alberto Fujimori, in the case of Peru.

Using a selection of literary texts and pieces of performance that encompass the last six decades, The Language of the In-Between offers an analysis of how, in part through representation, the voice of the poor and racialized travesti evolved from a condition of victim without power to an agent of social transformation. Dr. Almenara is also a published author and teaches the Creative Writing in Spanish class, she created in 2017.