Carnegie Mellon University

Anne Lambright

Anne Lambright

Department Head and Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of Hispanic Studies

Address
Department of Modern Languages
Carnegie Mellon University
341 Posner Hall
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Education: Ph.D., The University of Texas at Austin, Latin American and Iberian Literatures and Cultures; MA, The University of Texas at Austin, Latin American and Iberian Literatures and Cultures; BA Southern Methodist University, Spanish, History, and Latin American Studies

Bio

Grounded in a deep belief in the transformative power of art and the humanities to advance social justice and human rights, I am drawn to creative cultural production—literature, film, performance, and the visual arts—as sites of resistance, where dominant culture is questioned and alternative visions of individual subjectivity and collective life articulated. My research centers on race and ethnicity in Andean literature and culture, particularly on the place of indigenous and indigenous-mestizo peoples and cultures in Peruvian national discourse and identity. My first monograph, Creating the Hybrid Intellectual: Subject, Space, and the Feminine in the Narrative of José María Arguedas (Bucknell UP, 2007), is the first major English-language study of Latin America’s most important indigenista writer and examines ethnicity, gender, and national discourse in this Peruvian author’s narrative fiction. My co-edited volume, Unfolding the City: Women Write the City in Latin America (U of Minnesota, 2007), gathers notable literary scholars to explore Latin American women writers’ portraits of urban life. My second monograph, Andean Truths: Transitional Justice, Ethnicity, and Cultural Production in Post-Shining Path Peru (Liverpool UP, 2015), winner of the MLA’s Katherine Singer Kovacs prize, studies how literature and the arts challenge the dominant narrative of national peace and reconciliation in Peru, after two decades of civil war, as constructed by Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. My latest, forthcoming work, Yuyachkani’s Human Rights Theater: A Critical Anthology of Five Plays provides annotated translations, with scholarly introduction, of five plays in Spanish and Quechua by renowned Peruvian theater collective Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani. A citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, my current projects include a multi-media exploration of Chickasaw storyteller Te Ata Thompson’s global travels (including a year in Pittsburgh while studying drama at Carnegie Tech in 1921 and a voyage to Peru in 1937), contemplating Te Ata’s development an early, organic, ethnographer, as well as a book-length study of transnational Quechua cultural networks and issues of global indigeneity.

  •  Andean Literature and Culture 
  • Human Rights and Social Justice
  • Critical Transnational Indigenous and Native American Studies
  • Translation Theory and Practice
  • Contemporary Latin American Literature and Culture
  • Modern Language Association’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for Outstanding Book on Latin America or Spain. For Andean Truths, 2016.
  • Charles A. Dana Research Professorship, Trinity College, 2015-2017.
  • National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, August 2012-August 2013.
  • External Residential Faculty Fellowship, University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, August 2010-May 2011.
  • Millicent C. McIntosh Fellowship, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, June 2007-2009
  • Co-director, Hospitality Initiative, Center for the Arts in Society, CMU, 2023-2026
  • Co-Chair, Associate Dean for Student Success search, CMU, Spring 2022
  • ACLS-Mellon Leadership Institute for a New Academy (LINA), January-September 2023
  • Member, Editorial Board Committee on Indigenous Languages and Literatures, Chasqui, March 2023-present
  • Member, Editorial Board, PMLA, July 2021-June 2023
  • Flora Tristan Book Prize Jury, Peru Section of Latin American Studies Association, 2021

Department Member Since 2020