Rate My Professor Mercedes Rodriguez

Dr. Lopez Rodriguez specializes in Spanish American literature from the 16th to 19th centuries, with research interests encompassing literature and visual arts, race and cultural difference in Spanish America, post-colonial literatures in the Andes, food studies, disgust studies, and senses and emotions in Latin America. Her interdisciplinary scholarship, at the intersection of literary studies, ethnography, history, and art history, explores racialized representations of Andean peasants and the textual construction of racial categories. She has authored two books: Blancura y otras ficciones raciales en los Andes colombianos del siglo XIX (Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2019) and Tiempos para rezar y tiempos para trabajar: La cristianización de las comunidades muiscas durante el siglo XVI (ICANH, 2001). Selected publications include the chapter “Racial Fictions: Constructing Whiteness in Nineteenth Century Colombian Literature” in A History of Colombian Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2016), and recent articles “Romanticism beyond the Grave: The Exhumation of Jorge Isaacs’s Body and the Political Modernization of the Romantic Hero in Early Twentieth-Century Colombia” (Comparative Literature Journal, 2025) and “Food Encounters in the Tropics and the Andes” (2025). She has translated works such as Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Andes (2017). Awards include the McCausland Faculty Fellowship (2019-2022) and ICANH’s Best Work in Colonial History (2001). As Chair of the Latino/Hispanic Faculty Caucus, she engages in university service and has directed several Ph.D. dissertations and M.A. theses. Current projects include Sensing and Feeling the Other: Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching Emotions in Colombia 1850-1970 and stories of Colombian immigrants in South Carolina.