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

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

Mathilda Shepard is a scholar of contemporary Latin American Cultural Studies with research interests in the environmental humanities, Indigeneity, visual culture, and gender and sexuality studies.

Her book manuscript, Vital Forms: Activist Media and the War Against Life in Colombia, examines how Indigenous and Afro-descendant movements for territorial autonomy have challenged dominant narratives of violence in 21st-century Colombia. Focusing on activist media ranging from videos and print publications to performance, installation and textile art, Vital Forms highlights the role of cultural production in understanding Colombia’s territorial conflicts as struggles between extractive capitalism and communal forms of life. By reframing the wars on ‘drugs’ and ‘terror’ as a war against life, Black and Indigenous movements often locate violence—and the possibility of resistance—in the fabric of relations between humans, plants, animals, water, soil and the built environment. The media objects produced by these movements critically interrogate the processes by which ecologies of mutual codependence are violently converted into relations of property, profit and commodification. Insisting that another form of life is possible, they enact dissident subjectivities beyond the frameworks of multiculturalism and human rights, mediating inter-ethnic, multispecies and transnational solidarities against extractivist violence economies across the Americas. 

Dr. Shepard’s other long-term projects investigate plantation economies and architectures of separation in Latin American cultural production; post-pornography; and Indigenous genealogies of queer and transfeminist thought. Her articles and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Interventions, the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Journal of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, Romance Notes, Revista de Estudios Colombianos, and Revista de Estudios de Género y Sexualidades. She 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 America cultrual studies
• Visual culture
• Indigenous studies
• Gender and sexuality studies
• Environmental hunmanities
• Colombia, Mexico, and the Southern Cone

Recent Publications

•  “Mother Earth Liberating Herself: Indigenous Mobilizations, Planetary Relations and Transcorporeal Solidarities in Cauca, Colombia.” Forthcoming in Interventions.
• With John Beusterien: “The Llaneros, Bison, and Animal Domestication.” The Llaneros: The Ethnic Mexican Southern Great Plains, 1540-1880, ed. Joel Zapata, Alex Hunt, John Beusterien and Andrew Reynolds, University of Oklahoma Press. (Under review).  
• “Detonando miradas: una conversación con Amber Bemak y Nadia Granados” (Interview). Forthcoming in Revista de Estudios de Género y Sexualidades.
• With Jorge Hernández Camacho and Criseida Santos Guevara: “Corrido Vibrante/Vibrant Currents: Visual Poetry on the Llano Estacado,” Water on the Llano Estacado, ed. Britta Anderson and John Beusterien, Texas Tech University Press. (Under review).
• “Un witral de hebras heridas: tejiendo miradas solidarias en Piñen de Daniela Catrileo.” Forthcoming in Romance Notes.
• “Suturing or Puncturing the Social Fabric? Afro-Caribbean Textile Art and the Limits of Repair,” Journal of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 4, no. 4, 2022.
• "Una opción sutil de protestar: Literary magazines and subterranean resistance in Putumayo, Colombia."Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 30, no. 3, 2021.

Teaching

Examples of courses taught by Dr. Shepard include the graduate seminars “Cultural Studies Beyond the Human: Perspectives from the Plantation Américas” and “Biopolitics, Necropolitics and Políticas de la Vida in Latin America”. She has also taught undergraduate courses on Indigenous literature, film and visual art; human rights; and environmental humanities. During academic years 2023-2025, Dr. Shepard is contributing to the development of Texas Tech's Indigenous and Native American Studies (INAS) program as an Expanding the Circle: Indigenous and Native American Studies faculty fellow.