Rate My Professor Martinez Reyes

Dr. Consuelo Martínez Reyes is Senior Lecturer in Spanish and Latin American Studies in the School of International Studies, Faculty of Arts, at Macquarie University. She obtained her PhD in Romance Languages (Spanish) from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010, with the dissertation 'Literary and Cinematic Representations of Lesbian Love in the Hispanic Caribbean.' She also holds an MA in Romance Languages from the University of Pennsylvania (2005), focusing on Colonial Latin America; a BA in Comparative Literature from the University of Puerto Rico (2003); and an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish from New York University. Before joining Macquarie University, she served as a faculty member in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at The Australian National University and taught at Princeton University and Swarthmore College. As a writer and translator, she has contributed to literary works including editing and translating unpublished plays.

Martínez Reyes's research centers on representations of gender, sexuality, and national sentiments in Hispanic Caribbean literature and cinema, particularly across Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Her interests include the historical invisibility of lesbianism in regional literary and cinematic histories, symbolic or silenced portrayals of alternative female sexualities, the formation of a lesbian literary and filmic canon, affective decolonization through female leadership and emotional bonds in national discourses, decolonial thought in contemporary Puerto Rican literature addressing erased histories, intersections of politics and sexuality, feminist theory, polyamory, and female activism within neocolonial contexts. Key publications encompass her monograph Queer Women in the Hispanic Caribbean (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025); Not the Time to Stay: The Unpublished Plays of Víctor Fragoso, which she edited and translated (Centro Press, 2018); the short story collection En blanco (La Pereza, 2018), published in English as Blank Canvases (Lazy Press, 2021); 'From alienation to revolution: female characters as decolonial tools in J.L. Torres's The Accidental Native' (Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, 2024); 'Crónica de Centeno' (Caribe: Revista de cultura y literatura, 2022); and 'Prodigal Daughters: Portraying Lesbians in Hispanic Caribbean Cinema' (Journal of Lesbian Studies, 2012). She chairs the board of Caribbean Conjunctures: The Caribbean Studies Association Journal (2021–present) and has presented on topics including 'Combative Kissing, Combative Twerking: Community and Affect in Puerto Rican Politics' (2021) and 'Paisajes lésbicos puertorriqueños' (2021).