DEPARTMENT OF SPANISH & PORTUGUESE

The research and intellectual production of S.B. West, PhD engages “Latin American” literary and cultural canon hemispherically, with an emphasis on textual production from the Mayan or Yucatán peninsula. Their work is organized around abolitionist, decolonial and trans feminisms that question and challenge the colonial, cisheteronormative underpinnings of gender, class and race relations. Their current book-length project, entitled Autonomy and Abolition in the "Caste War", is a rereading of Yucatán’s nineteenth-century textual register that emphasizes how the gender and race war mobilized the transference of colonial oppression into liberal state-building. They also have active projects on contemporary Yucatec Maya or Maaya T'aan “literature”, US Spanish-language “im/migration” literature, and feminist theory.