- History of Science and Technology, Latinx Studies, Latin American Colonial Literature, Transatlantic studies, Latin American Studies, Comparative Luso-Hispanic Studies, and 8 moreScience and Technology Studies, Science, Technology and Society, History of Science, History of Technology, History of Medicine, Philosophy of Science, Social Studies Of Science, and Numismatics Portugalösersedit
- Currently I am an assistant professor of Spanish at Central Connecticut State University in the department of World L... moreCurrently I am an assistant professor of Spanish at Central Connecticut State University in the department of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. I received my PhD in Spanish and Portuguese Colonial Latin American Lit. and Culture from The Ohio State University in 2017. My scholarship intersects with the fields of Latin/x American literature and culture from the colonial period to the present, indigenous studies, and comparative studies, with a focus on the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America.
My current research works to decenter western-dominated historiographical discourse to include marginalized perspectives and experiences in the interest of social-justice advocacy via literature and art.
This critical approach to western historiographical discourse stems from the work that I began in my dissertation, “The Company of Jesus in Colonial Brazil and Mexico: Missionary Encounters with Amerindian Healers and Spiritual Leaders, 1550-1625,” in which I focus on the spiritual politics that arose at the junction of sorcery, spiritual authority, and smallpox in Jesuit letters and natural histories to analyze how indigenous communities negotiated and resisted Christianization. In the case of sixteenth-century Mexico, for example, Jesuits sought to Christianize indigenous groups, but their engagement with local traditions also yielded insights into local healing rituals and natural medicines. I argue that missionary contributions to science in the Americas is a function of their appropriation of indigenous medical knowledge. This project included archival work in Brazil, Portugal, Spain and London, funded by: an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Spanish at Ohio Wesleyan University; the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and Center for Latin American Studies at Ohio State; the John Carter Brown Library; the Folger Shakespeare Library; and two Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships to study Portuguese. This research is ongoing, and I will expand the project into a monograph to include the Jesuits in Japan to provide a transoceanic analysis of Jesuit missionary medicine.edit - Dr. Lisa Voigt, Associate Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, The Ohio State Universityedit
Bruja Born (2018) is Zoraida Córdova's second novel in her new hit series Brooklyn Brujas, a follow-up to Labyrinth Lost. Córdova, award-winning author and New Yorker with Ecuadorian roots, writes fantasy fiction with a Latinx twist in... more
Bruja Born (2018) is Zoraida Córdova's second novel in her new hit series Brooklyn Brujas, a follow-up to Labyrinth Lost. Córdova, award-winning author and New Yorker with Ecuadorian roots, writes fantasy fiction with a Latinx twist in the Brooklyn Brujas series, featuring a fully Latinx cast of primary characters with a diverse representation of sexual orientation. In Bruja Born, the reader will find the same motley crew of vampires, weres, faeries, and other supernatural creatures that appear in the Vicious Deep series as they follow the lives of the Mortiz sisters-Alex, Lula, and Rose-, three young brujas (the Spanish word for witch) that come into their powers in modern-day Brooklyn.
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Research Interests: History and Colonialism
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ABSTRACT This essay explores the way in which the political cartooning of Lalo Alcaraz and Eric J. García uses parody and satire, the stylistic linchpins of the genre, to help their followers process and cope with the physical and social... more
ABSTRACT This essay explores the way in which the political cartooning of Lalo Alcaraz and Eric J. García uses parody and satire, the stylistic linchpins of the genre, to help their followers process and cope with the physical and social disease brought on by the COVID-19 global pandemic. From their distinctly Chicanx perspectives, Alcaraz’s and García’s cartoons chronicle the way in which U.S. imperialism and neo-liberal socio-economic policies impact marginalized communities at home and around the globe, not only in their combination of text and image in their panels and strips, but also in the transcultural symbolism they draw from to depict U.S. politics and society. Because of the social artivism in which this work engages, it serves as a powerful shaping device, helping followers to process and cope with difficult realities while symbolically countering dominator discourse.
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This essay explores how Daniel Parada—author-artist of Zotz: Serpent and Shield (2011-2016), a serial comic set in sixteenth-century Mesoamerica—engages with indigenous subjects and experiences in a fictionalized historical context to... more
This essay explores how Daniel Parada—author-artist of Zotz: Serpent and Shield (2011-2016), a serial comic set in sixteenth-century Mesoamerica—engages with indigenous subjects and experiences in a fictionalized historical context to re-inscribe marginalized subjectivities into popular culture. Explicit in the publication of Zotz is the signaling of a lack of representation of indigenous history and culture in Latin/x America, which is true not only of Latin/x American comics production but also of the larger historical archive, an issue that I take up in my analysis of the representation of pre-Columbian history and culture in Parada’s work. In this series, with three-issues published and a fourth in production, Parada reimagines colonial history to create a storyworld in which Mesoamerican culture continues to unfold without the disruption of Spanish invasion in the region. Parada combines historical, social, and cultural elements from the pre-Columbian world to create an alternative space that continues these traditions in graphic narrative form.
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This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
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This chapter explores continuity and change in Nicaraguan dance rituals from the ¬colonial period to the present. It focuses on the way in which ritual movement, as a visual mode of communication, operates as a site for knowledge... more
This chapter explores continuity and change in Nicaraguan dance rituals from the ¬colonial period to the present. It focuses on the way in which ritual movement, as a visual mode of communication, operates as a site for knowledge transmission for indigenous cultures in the region. Nicaraguan dance as medicine takes on new significance following European encounter as native communities faced the social dis-ease produced by settler colonialism throughout the Americas. Moreover, post conquest, the preservation of native dance rituals represent important sites of power and knowledge for indigenous peoples who continue to assert their agency and transmit ancestral knowledge. We see this in the continuity and change of the elements of indigenous dance rituals that appear in The Güegüense, which has been consistently performed in Nicaragua since the colonial period. The Güegüense is a comedy-ballet that uses irony, wordplay, satire, and physical comedy to comment on colonial power relations.