Get to know us: International Relations & Politics faculty profiles

Our International Relations faculty members come from a wide range of academic and professional disciplines. You can browse all the faculty members in the faculty member directory, which is organized by department. But we wanted to give you a better sense of who these folks are, with some insight into their research interests, and academic interests. Drop us a line and let us know what you think.

Faculty Focus: Kenya Dworkin y Méndez
Kenya Dworkin y Méndez, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies with a Courtesy Appointment in English.		Kenya C. Dworkin y Méndez was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1955, and emigrated to the United States with her family in 1956. She earned her Ph.D. at U.C. Berkeley and is an Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies at Carnegie Mellon University, where she has taught and served as major advisor for Hispanic Studies students since August 1993. Her research interests include black and white Cuban, Cuban American, and U.S. Latino historical, literary, theater, and cultural studies, as well as Latin American, Jewish, and Sephardic cultural studies. Her book, Cuban to the Core: Theater and Performance in Pre-Exile South Florida, is currently being edited, and a second one, It Was All There in Black and White: The Writing of the Cuban Nation, 1868-1934, is in progress. She is co-editor of: Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature in the United States (Oxford 2001); En otra voz. Antología de la literatura hispana de los Estados Unidos (Arte Público 2002); Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage. Volume V (U of Houston, 2006); Spanish and Empire (Vanderbilt UP, 2007) She has published numerous articles and essays on U.S. Sephardic studies, Cuban literary nation building and Tampa cigarworker theater, among them, "Caught between the Cross and the Crescent and Star: Orientalist Co-ethnic Recognition Failure and New York's Sephardic Jews" in Alternative Orientalisms (Cambridge Scholars Press 2007), "La patria que nace de lejos: Cuba y lo cubano en la vanguardia de Martí" (Cuban Studies. Volume 36, 2005), and "Cuban Theater, American Stage: Before Exile" in The State of Latino Theater in the United States. Hybridity, Transculturation, and Identity (Routledge, 2002). She is also a co-editor of LAJS, the bulletin of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association, on whose board she serves, and is a contributing editor and translator for the journal ISLAS, a publication focused on Afro-Cuban and African Diaspora issues.