Faculty Spotlight: María Laura Martinelli

1. What are your primary research interests or areas of specialization?

I am a scholar of 19th-century Latin America with a focus in the Southern Cone. I am especially interested in the academic fields of literature, borderlands history, settler colonial studies, and Indigenous studies. My research examines nation-states’ formation processes from their margins—spaces where autonomous Indigenous peoples in areas such as the Araucanía, Pampas, Patagonia, and Chaco resisted expanding settler states. These borders did not vanish with the 19th century; they continue to shift and reappear in ongoing processes of Indigenous dispossession, as well as in new forms of exploitation and extraction of shared resources. My interdisciplinary work brings together methodologies from literary and cultural analysis, historical anthropology, as well as feminist and psychoanalytic theory. At its core is a search for the history of the present: an effort to understand both the specific ways postcolonial processes unfolded and how they continue to influence our political imagination.

 

2. What current or upcoming projects are you most excited about?

Right now, I am working on an entry for a dictionary of untranslatable terms related to gender, sexuality, and feminisms in Latin America and the Caribbean. My entry focuses on the notions of china and chineo. Besides referring to China as a country, these words have been used to describe Indigenous and rural women in Latin America, carrying racialized and gendered meanings since at least the 19th century. They also connect to practices of sexual and racial violence that continue to be addressed through contemporary activist campaigns.

I am also excited about my first book project, tentatively titled Settler Colonial Fantasies: Scenes of Captivity and Desertion in Nineteenth-Century Americas. The book rethinks 19th-century settler colonialism by examining two persistent tropes in the literature and culture of the Southern Cone and North America: white women allegedly abducted during Indigenous raids, and women who choose to leave, or desert “civilized” patriarchal life to live in the wilderness or among Indigenous groups. I show that these stories of captivity and desertion are not opposites, but paradoxical companions that reinforce each other: presenting women’s escape as resistance, they displace Indigenous sovereignty and sustain settler colonial power relations. By tracing the desires, fears, and fantasies embedded in these accounts, the project highlights how narratives of domination and liberation have long been entangled, shaping both historical and contemporary understandings of freedom, gender, and power in the Americas.

 

3. What courses are you teaching this year, and what do you hope students take away from them?

This Fall 2025, I am teaching Intermediate Grammar and Composition and Introduction to Textual Analysis, both in Spanish. In Grammar and Composition, class activities focus on helping students refine their grammar while developing skills for writing both personal and argumentative essays. We work on expanding vocabulary and building strategies to improve how they use writing to express their ideas.

In Introduction to Textual Analysis, students explore the technology of writing in the Spanish-speaking world. The course introduces key concepts for analyzing different textual and visual genres—narrative, drama, poetry, and film—while helping students develop analytical and argumentative skills that strengthen both their reading and writing.

In Spring 2026, I will teach Postcolonial Desires in Latin American Cultures, a Special Topics course in Spanish. The course examines the literary and cultural history of sexuality in Latin America from the 19th century to the present. We focus on how sexual and romantic representations have expressed and produced power relations, as well as how culture mediates and challenges them. My goal is that students cultivate critical reading skills, engage with debates informed by contemporary feminist movements in the Spanish-speaking world, connect these discussions to broader historical contexts, and use these ideas in a final written or creative project.

 

4. How do your research interests shape your teaching approach?

In my classes, I like to dwell on questions, tensions, and paradoxes, which I hope will stay with students long after the course concludes. For example, how is a text or cultural object shaping what I experience while reading? In the classroom, I foster close reading and historical contextualization, and I try to help students, both individually and collectively, enter a reflexive dialogue that questions their assumptions and sharpens their analytical skills. I also see collaboration in class and connecting ideas to the world outside as crucial for learning. My goal is for students to leave thinking critically, while also recognizing that interpretation can be creative and even transformative.

 

5. Was there a particular moment, mentor, or experience that had a major impact on your academic journey?

Some of the most influential experiences came from my professors in social anthropology, when I was an undergraduate student at the University of Buenos Aires. Their research was not only rigorous and innovative but also engaged with contemporary Indigenous struggles in Argentina. It was these struggles, and especially the demands of the Mapuche people in Puelmapu, that inspired me to explore the histories and discourses through which ongoing dispossession and racial and gendered violence are reproduced and so widely accepted. Seeing how scholarship and political engagement can go hand in hand has shaped the research questions I continue to pursue today.

 

6. What do you enjoy doing outside of your academic work?

I enjoy hiking, going to the cinema, trying out new cocktails (and mocktails), and taking long walks with friends.

 

7. Are there any books, films, podcasts, series, etc. that have especially inspired you recently?

Recently, the book Oración by María Moreno has resonated with me. I also really enjoy and recommend the digital magazines Yene and Ojalá.

 

8. What are you most looking forward to as you join the World Languages & Cultures community at the U?

I am looking forward to meeting and working with students from those in the Bridge Program to those pursuing the WLC major.