Marta M. Caminero-Santangelo, Ph.D.

Humanities - English

Professor

camsan@ku.edu

Primary office:

785.979.2513

Bailey Hall, 320

University of Kansas

1440 Jayhawk Boulevard

Lawrence, KS 66045

Second office:

Wescoe Hall, 3128

Bio
Academics
Publications
Presentations
Awards/Honors

I was born to Cuban immigrant parents in Canada, grew up in Pittsburgh, PA, earned my BA in English from Yale University and my PhD in English from UC Irvine. I came to KU as an Assistant Professor in 1997.

Education

Teaching

I teach courses in U.S. Latinx literature, African-American literature, literature of social justice, and 20th Century U.S. literature

Teaching Interests

Latinx literature
African-American literature
Social Justice literature
20th-Century American literature
U.S. Ethnic literature

Research

The central issue I address in my work on 20th century U.S. literary studies is the conjunction between literature, group identity, and what we might call activism, or the ability to promote social change. My research focuses on how these issues play themselves out in U.S. Latino/a literature. Recent literary scholarship has paid particular attention to how literature, understood broadly to include life-writing, oral histories, and testimonio, can contribute to "community" building, solidarity movements, social activism, and human rights struggles, and can thus play a role in inducing social change. It is this possibility that my scholarship is concerned with. My research is guided by an investment in making literary studies relevant to the "real"--to real, lived experiences--and in connecting what I do as a literary critic to larger discussions of effective social and political practices for groups that have experienced marginalization, disempowerment, or more extreme forms of oppression. As I see it, literature is one of many cultural forms that can participate in this larger discussion, because "good stories" tell powerful, engrossing narratives about who we are, what our place in the world is, what we can do about it, and what challenges we may face along the way. Literature can also introduce educated, middle-class audiences in the West to social crises far removed from them.

Research Interests

U.S. Latinx literature
Narratives of/about the undocumented
DREAMer / DACA narratives
Literature of Social Justice
Literature of trauma and testimony
Literature of Border Crossing

Service

In addition to University service, I work with immigrant rights organizations and give community presentations on U.S. Latino/a/x literature and culture and immigrant rights.

Selected Publications

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta M. “From Human Rights to Social Justice: Literature and the Struggle for a Better World.” A Companion to World Literature  , Wiley-Blackwell, 2020.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Latina/o Literary Forms.” A Companion to American Literature, Wiley-Blackwell, 2020.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Trauma Literature in the Americas.” The Routledge Handbook to the Culture and Media of the Americas., Routledge, 2020.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Making a Place: Life Narratives of Undocumented Youth.” The Immigrant Experience, edited by Maryse Jayasuriya, Salem Press, 2018.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Undocumented Immigration in U.S. Latino/a Literature.” Cambridge History of Latina/o Literature, 2018.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “DREAMers: Youth and Migration / American DREAMers and Mexico.” Modern Mexican Culture, edited by Stuart A Day, University of Arizona Press, 2017, pp. 25–45.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. Documenting the Undocumented: Latino Narrative and Social Justice in the Era of Operation Gatekeeper. University of Florida Press, 2016.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Historias Transfronterizas: Contemporary U.S. Latino Literature of Migration .” Cambridge Companion to Latino/a Literature, edited by John Moran Gonzalez, 2016.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “The New Sanctuary Movement.” Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in Contemporary Politics, Law and Social Movements, edited by Suzanne Oboler and Deena J. González, Oxford UP, 2015.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Latinidad.” The Routledge Companion to Latina/o Literature, edited by Frances Aparicio and Suzanne Bost, Routledge, 2013, pp. 13–24.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Narrating the Non-Nation: Literary Journalism and Illegal’ Border Crossings.” Arizona Quarterly, vol. 68, no. 3, 2012, pp. 157–76.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Documenting the Undocumented: Life Narratives of Undocumented Immigrants.” Biography, vol. 35, no. 3, 2012, pp. 449–71.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “The Voice of the Voiceless: Religious Rhetoric, Undocumented Immigrants, and the New Sanctuary Movement in the United States.” Sanctuary Practices in International Perspectives: Migration, Citizenship and Social Movements, edited by Randy Lippert and Sean Rehaag, Routledge, 2012.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Central Americans in the City: Goldman, Tobar, and the Question of Panethnicity.” Contemporary Literary Criticism, vol. 298, Jan. 2011, pp. 217–30.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “The Lost Ones: Post Gatekeeper Border Fiction and the Construction of Cultural Trauma.” Latino Studies, vol. 8, 2010, pp. 304–27.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “At the Intersection of Trauma and Testimonio: Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.” Antípodas: Journal of Hispanic and Galician Studies, Sept. 2009, pp. 5–26.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Central Americans in the City: Goldman, Tobar, and the Question of Panethnicity.” LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, vol. 20.3, June 2009, pp. 173–95.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta, and Roy Boland. “Moving Stories: Trauma and the Migrating Trujillo Narrative.” Introduction to Antípodas: Journal of Hispanic and Galician Studies, vol. 20, 2009, pp. 1–3.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta, and Roy Boland, editors. “Trujillo, Trauma, Testimony: Mario Vargas Llosa, Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Díaz and Other Writers on Hispaniola.” Antípodas: Journal of Hispanic and Galician Studies, vol. 20, 2009.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. On Latinidad: US Latino Literature and the Construction of Ethnicity. University Press of Florida, 2007.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Multiple Personality and the Postmodern Subject: Theorizing Agency .” Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy, edited by Bernice M. Murphy, McFarland & Company, 2005, pp. 52–80.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “The Pleas of the Desperate: Collective Agency versus Magical Realism in Ana Castillo’s So Far From God.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 24.1, 2005, pp. 81–103.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Puerto Rican Negro: Defining Race in Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets.” MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.), vol. 29.2, 2004, pp. 205–26.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Jasón’s Indian: Mexican Americans and the Denial of Indigenous Ethnicity in Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 45.2, 2004, pp. 115–28.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Moving Beyond ‘The Blank White Spaces’: Atwood, Postmodernism, and Strategic Resistance.” Bloom’s Guides: Margaret Atwood’s </I<The Handmaid’s Tale, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House, 2004.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Contesting the Boundaries of ‘Exile’ Latino/a Literature.” Twayne Companion to Contemporary World Literature, edited by Pamela A. Genova, Twayne; Thomson Gale, 2003, pp. 825–34.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Margarita Engle, Cuban American Conservatism, and the Construction of (Left) U.S. Latino/a Ethnicity.” Lit: Literature / Interpretation / Theory, vol. 13.4, 2002, pp. 249–67.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Contesting the Boundaries of ‘Exile’ Latino/a Literature.” World Literature Today, vol. 74.3, 2000, pp. 507–17.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Beyond Otherness: Negotiated Identities and Viramontes’s The Cariboo Cafe.” Women on the Edge: Ethnicity and Gender in Short Stories by American Women, edited by Corinne Dale and J.H.E. Paine, Garland Publishing, 1998, pp. 19–33.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta, and Roy Boland. “Cultural Collisions and Cultural Crossings: Psychic Borderlands in the Works of Julia Alvarez, Manlio Argueta and Alfredo Conde.” Introduction to Antípodas: Journal of Hispanic and Galician Studies, vol. 10, 1998, pp. 9–11.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta, and Roy Boland, editors. “Cultural Collisions and Cultural Crossings: Psychic Borderlands in the Works of Julia Alvarez, Manlio Argueta, and Alfredo Conde.” Antípodas: Journal of Hispanic and Galician Studies, vol. 10, 1998.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Speaking for Others: Problems of Representation in the Novels of Julia Alvarez.” Antípodas: Journal of Hispanic and Galician Studies, vol. 10, 1998, pp. 53–66.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. The Madwoman Can’t Speak: Or Why Insanity Is Not Subversive. Cornell University Press, 1998.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Beyond Otherness: Negotiated Identities and Viramontes’s The Cariboo Cafe .” Journal of the Short Story in English , 1996, pp. 29–42.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Multiple Personality and the Postmodern Subject: Theorizing Agency.” Lit: Literature / Interpretation / Theory, vol. 7, Apr. 1996, pp. 63–86.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “The Madwoman Can’t Speak: Post-War Culture, Feminist Criticism, and Welty’s June Recital.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 15.1, 1996, pp. 123–46.

Selected Presentations

Caminero-Santangelo, M. (10/17/2017). Documenting the Undocumented. Donnelly College, Kansas

Caminero-Santangelo, M. (10/2/2017). ‘Who Are We?’ Latinidad and the Construction of Ethnicity

Caminero-Santangelo, M. (4/11/2017). Being ‘Illegal’: Understanding Undocumented Immigrant Youth. Pittsburg State University, Kansas

Caminero-Santangelo, M. (1/21/2017). Stories of the Undocumented: Cultural Trauma and American DREAMers. Center for Migration Research, University of Kansas

Caminero-Santangelo, M. (11/30/2016). The Other American Dreamers: Latinx Youth Narratives of Illegality. Ethnic Studies Conference of the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration. Yale University, New Haven, CT

Caminero-Santangelo, M. (5/31/2016). In Search of Parents: The Other DREAMers in US Latino/a Literature. Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Conference. New York, NY

Caminero-Santangelo, M. (7/18/2014). Undocumented Borders: Literature and Unauthorized Immigration in the Classroom. Latino Studies Association Conference. Chicago, IL

Caminero-Santangelo, M. (5/29/2014). 'Bird's-Eye View': Memory, Witness, and Community in García's 'A Handbook to Luck'. Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Conference. Chicago, IL

Caminero-Santangelo, M. (4/7/2014). Undocumented Odysseys: Stories of Border Crossing. Northwestern University

Caminero-Santangelo, M. (3/31/2013). Illegality / Illegitimacy: Undocumented Immigration and the Caribbean Family in Junot Díaz’s Drown. “Haciendo Caminos” U.S. Latinoa/o Literary Theory and Criticism Conference,. New York NY

Caminero-Santangelo, M. (3/31/2013). Latin ‘Families’ and ‘Accidents of Geography’: Unauthorized Immigration in the Writing of Achy Obejas. MELUS (Multi-ethnic Literature of the U.S.) Conference. Pittsburgh, PA

Caminero-Santangelo, M. (3/31/2013). Roundable: Routledge Companion to Latina/o Literature. Latina/o Literary Theory and Criticism Conference. New York NY

Caminero-Santangelo, M. (5/31/2012). Undocumented Immigration and the Caribbean Connection: Pan-ethnicity and Illegality in the Writing of Cristina Garcia, Achy Obejas, and Julia Alvarez. LASA (Latin American Studies Association) Conference. San Francisco, CA

Caminero-Santangelo, M. (10/31/2009). Documenting the Undocumented: Stories of Migration, Border-Crossing, and Unbelonging. Seaver Lecture, University of Kansas. Lawrence, KS

Caminero-Santangelo, M. (4/30/2009). The Lost Ones: Post-Gatekeeper US Latina Fiction and the Construction of Cultural Trauma. Joint Conference on Migration, Border, and the Nation-State. Texas Tech University and United States Association for Commonwealth Literatures and Languages Studies. Lubbock, TX

Caminero-Santangelo, M. (2/28/2008). Unauthorized Stories: Urrea's The Devil's Highway and Martínez's Crossing Over as Narratives of 'Illegal' Crossings. Nuestra America in the U.S.? Latino/a Studies Conference. Lawrence, KS

Caminero-Santangelo, M. (10/31/2007). True Stories of 'Illegal' Border Crossings: Narrating the Non-Nation. University of Nebraska at Omaha. NE

Selected Awards & Honors

Frances L. Stiefel Professorship
Department of English, University of Kansas
2015 - 2017

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