Marta Caminero-Santangelo

Marta Caminero-Santangelo
  • Chair
  • University Distinguished Professor
she/her/hers

Contact Info

Phone:
785-979-2513
Wescoe Hall, Room 3001E
Wescoe Hall, Room 3128

Personal Links

Biography —

I was born to Cuban immigrant parents in Canada, grew up in Pittsburgh, PA, earned my BA in English from Yale University and my PhD in English from UC Irvine. I came to KU as an Assistant Professor in 1997.

Research —

Research

The central issue I address in my work on 20th and 21st century literary studies is the conjunction between literature, group identity, and what we might call activism, or the ability to promote social change. My research focuses on how these issues play themselves out in U.S. Latino/a literature. Recent literary scholarship has paid particular attention to how literature, understood broadly to include life-writing, oral histories, and testimonio, can contribute to "community" building, solidarity movements, social activism, and human rights struggles, and can thus play a role in inducing social change. It is this possibility that my scholarship is concerned with. My research is guided by an investment in making literary studies relevant to the "real"--to real, lived experiences--and in connecting what I do as a literary critic to larger discussions of effective social and political practices for groups that have experienced marginalization, disempowerment, or more extreme forms of oppression. As I see it, literature is one of many cultural forms that can participate in this larger discussion, because "good stories" tell powerful, engrossing narratives about who we are, what our place in the world is, what we can do about it, and what challenges we may face along the way. Literature can also introduce educated, middle-class audiences in the West to social crises far removed from them.

Research Interests

  • U.S. Latinx literature
  • Literature of the Latinx Heartland
  • Literature by/about Afro-Cubans
  • Narratives by/about the undocumented
  • DREAMer/DACA narratives
  • Literature of Social Justice
  • Literature of trauma and testimony
  • Literature of Border Crossing

 

Teaching —

Teaching

I teach courses in U.S. Latinx literature, African-American literature, literature of social justice, and 20th Century U.S. literature

Teaching Interests

  • Latinx literature
  • Literature of Trauma and Testimony
  • Social Justice literature
  • 20th-Century American literature
  • U.S. Ethnic literature

Selected Publications —

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. Documenting the Undocumented: Latino Narrative and Social Justice in the Era of Operation Gatekeeper. University of Florida Press, 2016.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. On Latinidad: US Latino Literature and the Construction of Ethnicity. University Press of Florida, 2007.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. The Madwoman Can’t Speak: Or Why Insanity Is Not Subversive. Cornell University Press, 1998.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Making a Place: Life Narratives of Undocumented Youth.” The Immigrant Experience, edited by Maryse Jayasuriya, Salem Press, 2018.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Undocumented Immigration in U.S. Latino/a Literature.” Cambridge History of Latina/o Literature, 2018.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “DREAMers: Youth and Migration / American DREAMers and Mexico.” Modern Mexican Culture, edited by Stuart A Day, University of Arizona Press, 2017, pp. 25–45.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Historias Transfronterizas: Contemporary U.S. Latino Literature of Migration .” Cambridge Companion to Latino/a Literature, edited by John Moran Gonzalez, 2016.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “The New Sanctuary Movement.” Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in Contemporary Politics, Law and Social Movements, edited by Suzanne Oboler and Deena J. González, Oxford UP, 2015.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Latinidad.” The Routledge Companion to Latina/o Literature, edited by Frances Aparicio and Suzanne Bost, Routledge, 2013, pp. 13–24.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Narrating the Non-Nation: Literary Journalism and Illegal’ Border Crossings.” Arizona Quarterly, vol. 68, no. 3, 2012, pp. 157–76.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Documenting the Undocumented: Life Narratives of Undocumented Immigrants.” Biography, vol. 35, no. 3, 2012, pp. 449–71.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “The Voice of the Voiceless: Religious Rhetoric, Undocumented Immigrants, and the New Sanctuary Movement in the United States.” Sanctuary Practices in International Perspectives: Migration, Citizenship and Social Movements, edited by Randy Lippert and Sean Rehaag, Routledge, 2012.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Central Americans in the City: Goldman, Tobar, and the Question of Panethnicity.” Contemporary Literary Criticism, vol. 298, Jan. 2011, pp. 217–30.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “The Lost Ones: Post Gatekeeper Border Fiction and the Construction of Cultural Trauma.” Latino Studies, vol. 8, 2010, pp. 304–27.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “At the Intersection of Trauma and Testimonio: Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.” Antípodas: Journal of Hispanic and Galician Studies, Sept. 2009, pp. 5–26.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Central Americans in the City: Goldman, Tobar, and the Question of Panethnicity.” LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, vol. 20.3, June 2009, pp. 173–95.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta, and Roy Boland. “Moving Stories: Trauma and the Migrating Trujillo Narrative.” </i>Introduction to<i> Antípodas: Journal of Hispanic and Galician Studies, vol. 20, 2009, pp. 1–3.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta, and Roy Boland, editors. “Trujillo, Trauma, Testimony: Mario Vargas Llosa, Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Díaz and Other Writers on Hispaniola.” Antípodas: Journal of Hispanic and Galician Studies, vol. 20, 2009.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Multiple Personality and the Postmodern Subject: Theorizing Agency .” Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy, edited by Bernice M. Murphy, McFarland & Company, 2005, pp. 52–80.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “The Pleas of the Desperate: Collective Agency versus Magical Realism in Ana Castillo’s So Far From God.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 24.1, 2005, pp. 81–103.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Puerto Rican Negro: Defining Race in Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets.” MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.), vol. 29.2, 2004, pp. 205–26.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Jasón’s Indian: Mexican Americans and the Denial of Indigenous Ethnicity in Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 45.2, 2004, pp. 115–28.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Moving Beyond ‘The Blank White Spaces’: Atwood, Postmodernism, and Strategic Resistance.” Bloom’s Guides: Margaret Atwood’s </I<The Handmaid’s Tale<i>, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House, 2004.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Contesting the Boundaries of ‘Exile’ Latino/a Literature.” Twayne Companion to Contemporary World Literature, edited by Pamela A. Genova, Twayne; Thomson Gale, 2003, pp. 825–34.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Margarita Engle, Cuban American Conservatism, and the Construction of (Left) U.S. Latino/a Ethnicity.” Lit: Literature / Interpretation / Theory, vol. 13.4, 2002, pp. 249–67.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Contesting the Boundaries of ‘Exile’ Latino/a Literature.” World Literature Today, vol. 74.3, 2000, pp. 507–17.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Beyond Otherness: Negotiated Identities and Viramontes’s The Cariboo Cafe.” Women on the Edge: Ethnicity and Gender in Short Stories by American Women, edited by Corinne Dale and J.H.E. Paine, Garland Publishing, 1998, pp. 19–33.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta, and Roy Boland. “Cultural Collisions and Cultural Crossings: Psychic Borderlands in the Works of Julia Alvarez, Manlio Argueta and Alfredo Conde.” </i>Introduction to<i> Antípodas: Journal of Hispanic and Galician Studies, vol. 10, 1998, pp. 9–11.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta, and Roy Boland, editors. “Cultural Collisions and Cultural Crossings: Psychic Borderlands in the Works of Julia Alvarez, Manlio Argueta, and Alfredo Conde.” Antípodas: Journal of Hispanic and Galician Studies, vol. 10, 1998.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Speaking for Others: Problems of Representation in the Novels of Julia Alvarez.” Antípodas: Journal of Hispanic and Galician Studies, vol. 10, 1998, pp. 53–66.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Beyond Otherness: Negotiated Identities and Viramontes’s The Cariboo Cafe  .” Journal of the Short Story in English , 1996, pp. 29–42.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Multiple Personality and the Postmodern Subject: Theorizing Agency.” Lit: Literature / Interpretation / Theory, vol. 7, Apr. 1996, pp. 63–86.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “The Madwoman Can’t Speak: Post-War Culture, Feminist Criticism, and Welty’s June Recital.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 15.1, 1996, pp. 123–46.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta M. “From Human Rights to Social Justice: Literature and the Struggle for a Better World.” A Companion to World Literature.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Latina/o Literary Forms.” A Companion to American Literature.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Trans-American Trauma Literatures in the United States.” Rethinking the Americas, Ashgate.

Service —

Service

In addition to University service, I work with immigrant rights organizations and give community presentations on U.S. Latino/a/x literature and culture and immigrant rights.