New Faculty 2013
Michael Mejia
Michael Mejia received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama. He specializes in fiction and nonfiction writing and has research interests in contemporary experimental forms and contemporary international fiction, particularly fiction in translation from Latin America. He is also interested in the history of Mexican immigration and the Mesoamerican codex and its contemporary adaptation for art books, such as those of Enrique Chagoya. At the University of Utah, Michael has taught a course on Contemporary Latin American Fiction in Translation, covering post-WW II fiction, from the work of Juan Rulfo to César Aira and Alejandro Zambra.
Michael is the author of a novel, Forgetfulness (Fiction Collective 2), and his fiction and nonfiction have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including AGNI, Denver Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, Forms at War and My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me. He has received a Literature Fellowship in Prose from the NEA and a grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation. Michael is also the co-founding editor of Ninebark Press, a literary press dedicated to publishing innovative works by both new and established writers, especially projects that cross boundaries of genre, culture, and aesthetic. Prior to his appointment at the University of Utah, Michael taught creative writing, literature, and film at Berry College in Mount Berry, Georgia.
María del Mar González
María del Mar González-González is the Raymond C. Morales Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Utah. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, specializing in Modern and Contemporary art of Latin America and U.S. Latino/a art. Her dissertation, The Politics of Display: Identity and State at the San Juan Print Biennial, 1970-1981, explores this biennial as a space for the construction and redefinition of cultural and national identities in the late twentieth century. At the core of this investigation are the complex cultural and political relations among the U.S. and Puerto Rico and other Latin American nations.
Her research interests in the field include art biennials, the global art market, museum collections and displays, national identity, diversity and multiculturalism, political art, institutional history, photography, and reprographic arts. She has held numerous fellowships in museums and cultural institutions including the Getty Foundation, the National Museum of American History-Smithsonian Institution, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Phillips Collection, and the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico. Currently, she is working on an article on the Puerto Rico-based conceptual art team of Allora & Calzadilla.
Kathryn Grace
Kathryn Grace's research fits squarely within the field of Population Geography. Her research highlights the role of context in various aspects related to maternal and child health-primarily reproductive health and family planning decision-making. Her geographic training (PhD geography from University of California, Santa Barbara) and quantitative background (M.A. statistics also from UCSB, MSPH biostatistics from Tulane University) enable her to bring a unique perspective to spatial demography through her use of a quantitative, mixed-disciplinary approach to the examination of the way that individual, family, or household outcomes are conditioned by place; including both the culture and the natural environment. Kathryn currently researches union formation trends in Central America, fertility outcomes of immigrant Guatemalan women who live in Los Angeles, and a number of projects related to food, agriculture and health in countries throughout Africa.
Alejandro Quin
Alejandro Quin holds a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Michigan and an MA in Spanish from the University of Florida. He specializes on Latin American literature and culture since the nineteenth century, including comparative approaches to Brazilian and Spanish-American studies. His current research centers on the question of sovereignty as expressed through fictional articulations between nature and politics in the cultural production related to three contexts: the Amazon Rubber Boom in Brazil and Colombia; peasant revolts and state authoritarianism in mid-twentieth century Paraguay; and the Central American Revolutions of the 1980s.
Before coming to the University of Utah, he was Assistant Professor of Spanish and Cultural Studies at Michigan Tech University. This year he will be teaching courses on modern and contemporary Latin American cultural history through literature and film.
Christopher Lewis
Christopher Lewis received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in Romance Languages and Literature with an emphasis in Luso-Brazilian Studies. His research and teaching focus on transmodernism in 21st-century Brazilian Literature at the intersections of music, politics, literature, and cinema. His most recent articles include a comparative study of the novelist João Guimarães Rosa and the composer Arnold Schoenberg as well as an examination of epic manifestations of fate in Camões and Torquato Tasso.
Before his appointment at the University of Utah, he was Assistant Professor at the United States Military Academy at West Point and previously taught at Middlebury College and Harvard University, where he was awarded the Derek C. Bok Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Undergraduates. This year he will be teaching courses on Brazilian identity reflected through film, popular music during the Brazilian dictatorship, and surveys of Portuguese and Brazilian Literature. As a composer and arranger, he is a member of the American Society of Composers and Publishers (ASCAP) and his work has been performed internationally.