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

Office: CMLL 247
Mathilda.Shepard@ttu.edu

Mathilda Shepard is a scholar of Latin American cultural studies with research interests in film, television and digital media; Indigenous movements; environmental humanities; migration; and histories of conservative and reactionary thought in the region. She is currently working on two book projects. The first examines cultural responses to armed conflict in Colombia through disputes over the “post-conflict” expansion of sugarcane, oil palm and other plantation-style monocultures historically linked to state and paramilitary violence against Black, Indigenous, and campesino communities. The second is a transnational study concerned with the emergence of new right-wing media in Latin America, focusing on streaming platforms and entertainment figures such as Brasil Paralelo, Angel Studios, Eduardo Verástegui, Tim Ballard, and the hemispheric reactionary cultural networks that preceded them in the twentieth century.

Dr. Shepard has also worked on a number of place-based projects dealing with understudied areas of cultural and environmental history in the Llano Estacado. Along with Dr. Andrew Reynolds, she is active in the long-term research and pedagogical initiative Mayans on the Texas High Plains, an oral history project that seeks to educate the public about the historical presence of Maya-K’iche’ communities from Guatemala in rural West Texas. Dr. Shepard’s other writings on local topics are forthcoming in Los Llaneros: The Mexican Southern Plains, 1500-1900 (ed. Joel Zapata, Alex Hunt, John Beusterien and Andrew Reynolds, University of Oklahoma Press) and Water on the Llano Estacado (ed. Britta Anderson and John Beusterien, Texas Tech University Press).

Research areas:

• 20th and 21st- century Latin America cultrual studies
• Film, television and digital media
• Indigenous studies
• Environmental hunmanities
• Religion, migration and diasporas
• Histories of conservative and reactionary thought in the Americas

Recent Publications

• En la palabra ‘naturaleza’ nace el conflicto: Reflexiones para desalambrar, desgorgojear y sanar el corazón, (co-authored as part of Minga de Comunicación), Visitas al Patio 19.1, 2025.
• “Mother Earth Liberating Herself: Indigenous Mobilizations, Planetary Relations and Transcorporeal Solidarities in Cauca, Colombia.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2025.
• The Llaneros, Bison, and Animal Domestication (co-authored with John Beusterien), forthcoming in Los Llaneros: The Mexican Southern Plains, 1500-1900, ed. Joel Zapata, Alex Hunt, John Beusterien and Andrew Reynolds, University of Oklahoma Press.
• Corrido Vibrante/Vibrant Currents: Visual Poetry on the Llano Estacado, co-authored with Jorge Hernández Camacho and Criseida Santos-Guevara. Forthcoming in Water on the Llano Estacado (ed. Britta Anderson and John Beusterien), Texas Tech University Press.
• Un witral de hebras heridas: tejiendo miradas solidarias en Piñen de Daniela Catrileo, Romance Notes 64.1, 2024..
• 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 “Critical Conversations between Queer and Indigenous Studies,” “Cultural Studies Beyond the Human: Perspectives from the Plantation Americas,” and “Methods of Literary and Cultural Criticism.” She has also taught undergraduate courses in Spanish on topics including Human Rights, environmental humanities, Indigenous literatures and film, and place-based oral history research. From 2023-2025, she contributed to the development of TTU’s Indigenous and Native American Studies offerings through the NEH-funded Expanding the Circle: Indigenous and Native American Studies fellowship.