Overview
Stephanie M. López (she/ella) is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Romance Studies with a focus on 20th and 21st century Latin American literature and film and a Minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her areas of specialization include: decolonial theory, Latin American and Latinx feminism, motherhood studies, affect theory, race studies, visual culture, memory studies and diaspora studies. Her forthcoming article (2025) “Mirar de reojo: Countervisuality and Racialized Displacement in La playa D.C. (2012),” proposes mirar de reojo, looking sideways, as a narrative and cinematic technique that preserves the displaced subject’s autonomy by limiting filmic access to vulnerable communities. In addition to her teaching Spanish language courses at Cornell University, Stephanie has taught incarcerated students in Upstate New York through the Cornell Prison Education Program (CPEP) and has taught literature courses as the instructor of record at Syracuse University.
Her dissertation, Birthing a Common Mother analyzes representations of maternities in contemporary film and literature from Argentina, Colombia, and Venezuela that challenge essentializing images of mothers as social reproducers of a paternalistic state. Drawing from a wide corpus of decolonial feminist theory that includes the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, Betty Ruth Lozano and María Lugones, as well as Black Studies and ecocriticism, Birthing a Common Mother analyzes how depictions of maternity in the contemporary moment claim affective, transnational and “undesirable” spaces as commons in response to the failed nation-state and the national family. Her work has been supported by the Latin American and Caribbean Studies program and the Society for the Humanities as a Mellon Graduate Fellow and recipient of a Dissertation Writing Grant at Cornell University.
She is currently working on two additional research projects. The first one examines visual narratives of extraction and consumption in Colombia and local responses of feminist resistance. This project has been supported by the Latin American and Caribbean Studies program and the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University. The second project engages narratives of maternity from Latin America, the Caribbean and the U.S. through Public and Digital Humanities. Stephanie and her colleague are co-hosts of the forthcoming podcast La Malparidez from the Margins, sponsored by a Humanities New York Public Humanities Grant. This podcast project explores how narratives around maternity circulate meaning in cultural spaces and construct social, political and material realities. She earned her M.A. in Comparative Literature at The Pennsylvania State University (2019) and B.A. in Liberal Arts at the Florida Atlantic University.