Amelia Mañas earned a Ph.D. in Spanish at the University of Pennsylvania. She joined MLLL as an Assistant Professor in 2024. Previously, she worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Tulane University and Colby College.
Dr. Mañas’ research focuses on colonial literature and culture, with a particular emphasis on Mexico and visual studies. Her work examines the relationship between image and text in colonial literature and its negotiation of Western forms of writing and knowledge. In doing so, she interrogates the very notion of authorship in colonial territories and reconsiders the colonies’ roles within the global flows of knowledge during the 17th and 18th centuries. Drawing on a diverse array of primary sources—including poetry, relaciones de fiestas (accounts of festival events), didactic texts, maps, and letters—Dr. Mañas analyzes the materiality of writing and its multiple interventions in colonial discourses about the world.
At OU, Dr. Mañas teaches undergraduate courses on Latin American and Spanish literature and culture, as well as Hispanic cinema. At the graduate level, she offers a course on colonial literature.
“Toward a Proper Way of Being: Embedded Sounds and Civilized Words in Puebla’s Festivals (1730, 1753, 1768),” Victor Sierra Matute (ed.), Soundscapes of the Early Modern Hispanophone and Lusophone Worlds, New York, Routledge, 2024. 198-211.
“The Conquest of Mexico. 500 Years of Reinventions” review, The Colonial Latin American Review. 33/2, 2024. 266-268.
“Repositorios de poder o la función de la poesía visual en la Nueva España,” Caliope. Journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry. 27/2, 2022. 203-230.
“Rodrigo García y Santiago Sierra o el espectáculo de lo intolerable,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies. 96/7, 2019. 1177-1194.
In preparation:
“(Re)Shaping Public and Literary Spaces: Women in Colosso Eloquente Contest”
PhD, Hispanic Studies, University of Pennsylvania, 2021.
MA, Hispanic Studies, University of Pennsylvania, 2016.
MA, Teaching, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, 2012.
MA, Hispanic Literature and Art, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2011.
BA, Art History, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2010.
