Kenya C. Dworkin y Méndez
Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies with a Courtesy Appointment in English, Modern Languages
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Bio
Kenya C. Dworkin y Méndez’s Ph. D in Hispanic Literatures and Languages is from the University of California, Berkeley (1994). She is an associate professor of Hispanic Studies & Co-Director of the Master’s program in Global Communication and Applied Translation at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests include Cuban & U.S. Latinos studies. Dworkin has a co-edited volume titled Latinx Literature in Translation 1444-1886 for Cambridge University Press forthcoming in 2025, and she is completing monograph titled In Pursuit of Whiteness: Racial Impersonation, Performance, and Nostalgia in Cuban Immigrant Theater, a project for which she received an NEH fellowship and is under contract with the University of Michigan Press.
She also recently published “Racism and Erasure: Afro-Cubans in and beyond Tampa’s Cuban Independence Struggle," in Boletín Martiano Vol. 1, No. 3 (2022). University of Tampa: Center for José Martí Studies Affiliate, with Susan D.Greenbaum, and “Performing Blackness, Enacting Whiteness: The Conundrum of Race in José Martí’s Campaign for the Cuban Independence Project.” José Martí in Context. (Eds. Laura Lomas & Lourdes Ocampo). Cambridge University Press (forthcoming 2025). Dworkin is also an active translator of journal articles and books about race, history, and civic activism in contemporary Cuba.
In Pittsburgh, in addition to being a faculty member at CMU, she is the Executive Director of Coro Latinoamericano; President of the Latin American Cultural Union, and co-founder of a Hispanic children’s outreach program, CIRCULO, with two CMU colleagues.