Assistant Professor of Spanish
Ph.D., University of Virginia, 2022

Office: CMLL 247
Mathilda.Shepard@ttu.edu
http://www.mathildashepard.com 

Research

Mathilda Shepard's research broadly examines twentieth- and twenty-first century movements for Indigenous, Afro-diasporic and queer liberation in Latin American through the lenses of visual culture, performance studies, gender and sexuality studies, and the environmental humanities. Her book manuscript, Life Politics: Performing Dissident Corporealities in Colombia, studies how queer, Indigenous and Afro-descendant visual and performance artists have interrogated violence as a politico-philosophical problem and imagined rebellious subjectivities in Colombia since the 1990s. She has published scholarly articles in the Journal of Latin American Cultural studies, Journal of Latin American & Latinx Visual Culture and Revista de Estudios Colombianos. Her current projects include articles on Latin American post-pornography, contemporary Mapuche cultural production, and plantation afterlives in South America.

Dr. Shepard received her Ph.D. in 2022 from the University of Virginia, where her doctoral research was supported by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship.

Research areas:

• 20th- and 21st-century Latin American cultural production
• Indigenous and Afro-Latin American political thought
• Queer video and performance art
• Post-humanism, ecofeminist theory and the environmental humanities
• Film, literature and visual culture in Colombia and the Southern Cone
• Performance studies

Teaching

Dr. Shepard enjoys teaching courses on modern and contemporary Latin American cultural studies, especially in the areas of film, visual culture and performance art; Indigenous and Afro-diasporic political thought; ecocriticism and the environmental humanities; and queer/feminist cultural production. She is currently a fellow in the Teaching Mentoring through Peer Observation (TeMPO) program offered by the Teaching, Learning and Professional Development Center.

Current Courses:

• SPAN 2300: Social Change in the Hispanic World Through Film, Literature, Art and Music (Fall 2022).
• SPAN 4305: Advanced Spanish Grammar (Fall 2022). 

Selected Publications

• “Suturing or Puncturing the Social Fabric? Afro-Caribbean Textile Art and the Limits of Repair,” Journal of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture (forthcoming).
• "Una opción sutil de protestar: Literary magazines and subterranean resistance in Putumayo, Colombia." Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 30, no. 3, 2021.
• "Desplazamientos entretejidos: imaginarios transicionales y la diasporización de la memoria en los Tejidos de Mampuján," Revista de Estudios Colombianos 53, enero-junio 2019.