Oakes Faculty Fellows
The Oakes College faculty represents a wealth of expertise from the natural sciences to the humanities, and we are proud to have some of the top scholars in the world among our faculty. Our students major in nearly every discipline at UCSC—from economics and computer science, to theater arts and Latin American and Latino studies—and they are well supported by the depth and breadth of the Oakes College faculty and the extensive knowledge of our advising team.
TBA is Oakes's faculty chair!
The Chair of the Faculty is an Academic Senate member, other than the Provost, who is elected by the college Faculty to serve a two year term, and will serve as a member of the Executive Committee.
- Title
- Assistant Professor
- Division Humanities Division
- Department
- Literature Department
- Affiliations Spanish Studies, Latin American & Latino Studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Research Center for the Americas, Oakes College
- Phone
- Website
- Office Location
- Humanities Building 1, 333
- Office Hours No summer office hours
- Mail Stop Humanities Academic Services
Summary of Expertise
20th- & 21st-century Latin American and Latinx literatures and cultures, Indigenous studies, Amazonia, the environmental humanities, the spatial humanities, sound studies.
Research Interests
Professor Smith's research explores relationships among space, ecology, decolonial aesthetics, and development in Latin American and Latinx cultures. Her book, Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography after the Rubber Boom (Liverpool University Press, 2021), examines how stories told about the Amazon in canonical twentieth-century novels have shaped the way people across the globe understand and use the region. Her next book project studies the impact of the current climate crisis on configurations of family and kinship in twenty-first-century Latin American and Latinx cultures. Smith is co-founder of the Latin American Sound Studies Working Group with Tamara Mitchell and is working with Mitchell on an edited volume on Latin American literary sound studies. Professor Smith's work has appeared in The Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies; ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America; A contracorriente; Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures; and Ciberletras. She also co-edited the provocative graphic novel, United States of Banana.
Biography, Education and Training
PhD, The Johns Hopkins University
MA, Michigan State University
BA, Michigan State University
Languages: Spanish, Portuguese, French, Quechua
Selected Publications
2021. Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography after the Rubber Boom, Liverpool University Press.
2021. United States of Banana: A Graphic Novel, co-edited, The Ohio State University Press.
2020. Sounds of the Baguazo: Listening to Extractivism in an Intercultural Radio Programme from the Peruvian Amazon, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies.
2020. De Canaima al Parque Nacional Canaima: cuando la literatura entierra geografías indígenas, ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America.
Please see Google Scholar and Academia.edu for a complete list of publications.
