The Department of Hispanic Studies is proud to welcome two new faculty members, both of whom will be joining us in the Fall off 2014.  We look forward to their unique contributions in both teaching and research in our undergraduate and graduate programs at UK.. 

Associate Professor MÓNICA DÍAZ specializes in Colonial Latin American Studies. Her research focuses on native culture and women's cultural history and literature, particularly of eighteenth-century Mexico. Her book Indigenous Writings from the Convent: Negotiating Ethnic Autonomy in Colonial Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010) examines the existence of the only three convents opened exclusively for indigenous women in colonial Mexico. Currently, she is developing a project on legal documentation initiated by indigenous peoples about ecclesiastical matters in the late colonial period in Mexico, and a related project on missionary discourse and imperial expansion in the Spanish US Southwest. She is also working on a critical study and annotated bilingual edition tentatively entitled, Sor María Jesús de Agreda’s Cosmographical Writing: Producing Knowledge across the Atlantic, in collaboration with Grady Wray (University of Oklahoma). Her research has been funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ministry for Cultural Cooperation between Spain and the United States, the Hispanic History of Texas Project from the University of Houston, the University of Texas Pan American, the Newberry Library, and Georgia State University.

Assistant Professor MATT LOSADA received his doctorate in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught courses on Latin American and Spanish literature and film. His research on film, literature and media has been published in Hispanic Review, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Film Quarterly, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Chasqui, Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea, Latin American Literary Review, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, Cineaste, Cinema Scope, Romance Notes, Senses of Cinema, Jump Cut and elsewhere. He serves on the editorial board of Chasqui, and is working on a book on Argentine film and marginal space.