Bio

Grounded in a deep belief in the transformative power of art and the humanities to advance social justice and human rights, Anne Lambright is 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.

Her research focuses on race and ethnicity in Andean literature and culture, with particular attention to the role of Indigenous and Indigenous-mestizo peoples in Peruvian national discourse and identity. Her first monograph, Creating the Hybrid Intellectual: Subject, Space, and the Feminine in the Narrative of José María Arguedas (Bucknell University Press, 2007), is the first major English-language study of Latin America’s most important indigenista writer. It examines ethnicity, gender and national discourse in the narrative fiction of the Peruvian author José María Arguedas.

She is also co-editor of Unfolding the City: Women Write the City in Latin America (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), a collection that brings together leading literary scholars to explore how Latin American women writers portray urban life.

Her second monograph, Andean Truths: Transitional Justice, Ethnicity, and Cultural Production in Post-Shining Path Peru (Liverpool University Press, 2015), received the Modern Language Association’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize. The book examines how literature and the arts challenge the dominant narrative of peace and reconciliation constructed by Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission following two decades of internal conflict.

Her forthcoming work, Yuyachkani’s Human Rights Theater: A Critical Anthology of Five Plays, offers annotated translations and a scholarly introduction to five plays in Spanish and Quechua by the renowned Peruvian theater collective Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani.

A citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, Lambright's current projects include a multimedia exploration of Chickasaw storyteller Te Ata Thompson’s global travels—including a year spent in Pittsburgh studying drama at Carnegie Tech in 1921 and a 1937 voyage to Peru—that considers Te Ata’s development as an early, organic ethnographer. She is also working on a book-length study of transnational Quechua cultural networks and global indigeneity.

Department Member Since 2020