Dr. KC Barrientos is a native of New York. After obtaining her BA/MA, summa cum laude, in Spanish Literature and Latin American & Caribbean Studies, from the University at Albany, she won a Presidential Fellowship at the University of Notre Dame, where she earned her PhD in Spanish and Portuguese Literatures. Having always been enamored of poetry and cinema and compelled by the contemporary struggles of women in interracial and migratory spaces, Dr. Barrientos wrote her dissertation, Bodies Remembered, as an exposition of female suffering and reclamation in a canon of 20^th- and 21^st-century feminist poets from the Spanish Afro-Caribbean. In recognition of her dissertation work, Dr. Barrientos was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship to teach her specialization at Notre Dame.

Throughout her years of teaching and research, Dr. Barrientos has led seminars on the Central American and Caribbean diasporas; race and human rights; Fanonist evocations of decoloniality; and the problematics of borders and postcolonial tourism. In addition to Frantz Fanon, other writers she finds foundational to her thought and work are Michel Foucault, Angela Davis, Gloria Anzaldúa, Gayatri Spivak, and Gustavo Pérez-Firmat on marginalized bodies. She is most compelled by the poetry of Elizabeth Acevedo, on whose work she published an award-winning article, “‘Stranded’: Interrogating the Shame of the Afro-Latina Female Body.”

Dr. Barrientos has taught SPAN122: Basic Proficiency in Spanish Honors and SPAN210: Intermediate Spanish II Honors. Currently, she teaches SPAN303: Cultural Readings and Advanced Composition Honors. The latter course surveys Latin American and Spanish literature, art, and cinema from the 15^th-century colonial Encounter to contemporary imperialism. Upon successful completion of the class, students will have gained a panoramic understanding of the historical and cultural intersections between the Spanish-speaking world and the West, and will have honed their competency in close reading, literary critique, and cogent argumentation in a variety of formal writing formats in Spanish. In all the courses she teaches, Dr. Barrientos employs a dynamic, technologically driven, and interdisciplinary approach.