Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Olimpia E. Rosenthal is a new Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese who specializes in Comparative Colonial and Postcolonial Cultural Studies, Andean literature and visual culture, and Critical Race Studies. She received her PhD from the University of Arizona in 2013, and was a Visiting Assistant Professor at IU prior to her current position. During her graduate research, she was the recipient of several awards, including the Louise Foucar Marshall Dissertation Fellowship. She is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled “Condemning Mestizaje: Spatial Segregation and the Racialization of Sex in Colonial Latin America,” that traces the relationship between early modern notions of race that developed in the Iberian-Atlantic world (specifically in relation to notions of purity of blood) and systems of colonial racialization that emerged in the Americas in relation to mestizaje. She recently authored “La figura abyecta del mestizo en El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno,” and her article “As órfãs d'el rei: Racialized Sex and the Politicization of Life in Nóbrega's Letters from Brazil” will appear shortly in ellipsis: Journal of the American Portuguese Studies Association. At present, she is also co-organizing a workshop on Comparative Subalternities that will take place at IU’s Gateway Office in India in December.