History and Hispanic Studies, cum laude
BA
University of Pennsylvania
2008
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Faculty
Faculty
Monica Styles, PhD ( She/Her/Hers/ella)
Assistant Professor of Spanish
Department/Office
- World Languages & Cultures
School/College
- College of Arts & Sciences
Additional Positions
-
Certified WAC Instructor
Biography
Monica Styles is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Howard University in Washington, D.C and a former visiting research fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. She received her PhD from University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her research focus is representations and inclusion of Africans and people of African descent in early modern and modern Caribbean and Latin American literary culture. She is completing a book project that explores interracial intimacies in the Black literary tradition beginning in the porous geography of the Spanish Caribbean in the 16th and 17th centuries. She applies critical Black theory and Black feminist theory to trace how Black voices and embodiments in texts are part of a broader Black literary tradition. She is also advancing research for a second book manuscript on the Afro-Peruvian presence in colonial cultural production in the 17th century through analysis of the intersections of race and gender in writing about Afro-Peruvian healers. She has published in journals including The Afro-Hispanic Review, Hispania and Colonial Latin American Review.
Education & Expertise
Education
Spanish Literature
MA
Middlebury College
2011
Latin American Literature
PhD
University of Wisconsin-Madison
2018
Expertise
Colonial Latin America
I research colonial Latin American literature, culture and history with an emphasis on Afro-Diasporic contributions.
Race and Blackness
I study racial formations in colonial Latin America and how Blackness is articulated by Europeans and Afro-descendants primarily in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Academics
Academics
SPAN 083 Formation of Latin America
SPAN 060 Textual Analysis
SPAN 084 Contemporary Hispanic America.
SPAN 004 SPANISH IV
SPAN 087 Black Life in Latin America Through Literature and Film
Accomplishments
Accomplishments
ACLS Grantee 2023
My project is titled "Afro-Peruvians in the Colonial Latin American Literary Canon." This research project is designed to include the voices of historically underrepresented Afro-Peruvians in the Latin American literary canon. Source materials for this project are published and archival records concerning 17th century Afro-Peruvian healers and spiritual leaders. The questions to be pursued are: what ideologies are produced in the narratives in these records and how do race and gender intersect? How do Afro-Peruvians envision their roles in colonial society as communicated in the construction of these narratives about their lives and race and how do Afro-Peruvians talk back to stereotypes about Afro-descendants? This project proposes Afro-Peruvians exert power in narratives concerning their lives even though they are marginalized because of their race and gender.
Publications and Presentations
Publications and Presentations
"Tanbién son ellos de carne y güeso": Guaman Poma de Ayala's Radical Abolitionism
Monica Styles. “Tanbién son ellos de carne y güeso”: Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Radical Abolitionism.” vol 29, no 1, 2025.
Mysticism and Black Feminist Resistance in the Vida of Úrsula de Jesús
Monica Styles (2024) "Mysticism and Black feminist resistance in the Vida of Úrsula de Jesús", Colonial Latin American Review, 33:2, 183-208, DOI:10.1080/10609164.2024.2350864
The Development of Modern Racial Discourse in Alonso de Sandoval’s De Instauranda Aethiopum salute
Published in 2023 in the edited volume Relating Continents. Coloniality and Global Encounters in Romance Literary and Cultural History. Ed. Romana Radlwimmer. De Gruyter Latin American Literatures in the World Series
Foreshadowing Failure: Mulatto and Black Oral Discourse and the Upending of The Western Design in Thomas Gage's A New Survey (1648)
published in Hispania, vol 102 no 4, 2019
Voicing African Agency in Alonso de Sandoval’s De Instauranda Aethiopum Salute
published in The Afro-Hispanic Review vol 38 no 1, 2019
Colombian History and Afro-Intertextuality in De Instauranda Aethiopum Salute (1622) and Changó, el gran putas (1983)
Under review