Kathryn J. McKnight

Associate Professor of Spanish

Ortega Hall 419
(505) 277-3924
E-mail: mcknight@unm.edu

Research areas:

• Colonial literature
• Early modern Hispanic nun writers
• Afro-Hispanic narratives from colonial archival documents

Kathryn McKnight (M.A., Ph.D. in Spanish, Stanford University, 1987, 1992; B.A. in Latin American Studies, Earlham College, 1982). I am a scholar of Latin American colonial discourses and a passionate teacher of language, cultures, literatures and critical theory. These professional interests were sparked by living as a child of teachers in Africa, as an adolescent in small-town Indiana, and as a student of Latin America, activism and peace studies at a Quaker college. Studying the discourses of colonialism for me means asking: How did we come to these violent, messy and vibrant relationships? How might we see that distant colonial world and our own in new ways by analyzing the words of colonizers and colonized? My book The Mystic of Tunja. The Writings of Madre Castillo, 1671-1742 (1997) explores how one woman molded an autobiographical voice, both empowered and constrained by the Church. My more recent work on Inquisition testimonies examines the stories of Afro-Americans that conform to and challenge social relationships of colonialism and slavery. I am most energized learning from students in the classroom, as they think critically in exciting new ways and explore how to transform knowledge into action in the world.