Dr. Britta Anderson

Assistant Professor of Spanish
Ph.D., Washington University in St. Louis, 2016

Britta.Anderson@ttu.edu
CV
Academia profile
Personal website

I am originally from Albuquerque, NM, and was delighted to return to the Southwest when I joined Texas Tech's Spanish and Portuguese faculty in 2019. I teach classes on U.S. Latinx Literature, Border Studies, Latin American Film, and Cultures of the Spanish Speaking World. As an instructor, my priorities include hands-on participation, community engagement, connections between local and global processes, and students' health and well-being. As an undergraduate student in my class, you can expect to encounter a wide range of perspectives, propose and develop an original project, meet with me during office hours, and talk extensively with your classmates. You will learn from a variety of sources, including podcasts, music, recipes, film, poetry, testimony, and more. With graduate students, I emphasize hands-on mentorship in order to help students develop their own critical voices and prepare for success in academia or beyond. 

In my research, I examine contemporary Latinx and Mexican cultural production through the lens of gender, performance, and border studies. I study the borders—or policing of movement and belonging—that traverse the U.S. and Mexico, and the performances, public art, and literature that respond to these borders. I investigate the state and corporate systems that extend the militarized border logic far beyond the geo-political border, including highways, prisons, and factories. My recent publications, on Yuri Herrera’s novel Señales que precederán al fin del mundo and on the Chicana feminist tradition of autohistoria, address the tropes used to represent border reality and the framing of lived experience as intellectual knowledge, respectively. I am currently working on an interdisciplinary edited collection about water in the Llano Estacado region and a project that analyzes what I call a Latinx poetics of illegibility, through which authors undermine identitarian labels, opting for cultural expression that eludes ethnic representation.

Courses Taught

• Cultures of the Spanish Speaking World: Power, Community, and Justice
• U.S. Latinx Studies: Narratives of Awakening
• Introduction to World Cinema: Latin American Film
• Icons in Migration: Mythic Mexican Women in Literature and Popular Culture
• Border Studies Graduate Seminar
• Latinx Ecocriticism Graduate Seminar

Areas of Research

• Latinx Studies
• Border Studies
• Performance Studies
• Public Art and Visual Culture Studies
• Latin American and Latinx Literary and Cultural Studies
• Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
• Queer Theory
• Transnational feminisms

Selected Publications

• “The Walking Woman: Border Representation Beyond Hybridity in Yuri Herrera’s Señales que precederán al fin del mundo.” Romance Quarterly, vol. 71, no. 2, 2024, pp. 147-162. 
• Anderson, Britta. “Ectopic: Autohistoria-Teoría.” Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social, vol. 24. no. 1, 2024, pp. 176-185.
• Anderson, Britta. “Queer and Feminist Performance.” Latino Literature: an Encyclopedia for Students, edited by Christina Soto van der Plas and Lacie Rae Buckwalter Cunningham. ABC-Clio Press, 2023, pp. 207-217.
• “Public Grief and Collective Joy: Feminicide, Solidarity, and Feminist Hip Hop in Ciudad Juárez.” For the Culture: Hip-Hop and the Fight for Social Justice, edited by Lakeyta M. Bonnette-Bailey and Adolphus G. Belk, Jr. University of Michigan Press, 2022, pp. 226-239.
• Anderson, Britta. “Embodiment Against Borders: Discourses of Crisis and Collaborative Performance Art on the U.S.-Mexico Border Wall.” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, vol. 24, no. 1, 2021, pp. 129-148.
• Anderson, Britta. “Movilidad fronteriza en Their Dogs Came with Them de Helena María Viramontes.” Revista Iberoamericana, vol. 84, no. 265, 2018, pp. 995-1013.
• Anderson, Britta. “‘Un espacio al que entramos’: Presencia como resistencia en Precario de Cecilia Vicuña.” Vicuñiana: el arte y la poesía de Cecilia Vicuña, un diálogo sur/norte, edited by Meredith Clark, Cuarto Propio, 2015. pp. 97-121.