Graduate Teaching Assistants

Catalina Rojas

Maria Catalina Rojas Blanco is a Ph.D. Candidate in Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures - Spanish at the University of Tennessee, with a second concentration in Latin American Studies, and is a Graduate Teaching Associate. She completed a master’s degree in Foreign Languages and Literatures at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, IL. 

Her areas of research interests include Latin American and Caribbean literature by women writers, Afro-Hispanic culture and literature; issues at the intersection of Race, Gender, and the African legacy in the Spanish Americas; and Colombian women writers of African descent.

She is working in her dissertation,“Las Almanegras: alma y territorialidad de la poética afro femenina colombiana” (“Las Almanegras: Territoriality and Soul in Afro-Colombian Feminine Poetics”), under the direction of Dr. Dawn Duke. 

Recently, she has published her paper “ Georgina Herrera o el empoderamiento de las mujeres, las ancestras y las palabras” in MIFLC Review, Volume 19 Fall 2018-2019. The article can be found in http://miflc.com/volume-19/, http://miflc.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/C-Rojas-199-214.pdf

She has taught first and second-year Spanish Courses at Southern Illinois University (SIUC),  Intermediate Spanish courses at the University of Tennessee. Currently, she is teaching a third-year, upper-division Spanish composition and conversation course.

Both her teaching and research have received accolades, having been nominated for the Modern Foreign Language Graduate Teaching Award (2019-2020), as well as the Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures Grant for Doctoral Research (2020-2021).

Contacto: mrojasbl@vols.utk.edu