People & DepartmentsWashington Collegeelena-deanda-camacho

Elena Deanda-Camacho

Faculty
World Languages and Cultures
  • Professor of Spanish and Black Studies; Director of  Black Studies Minor

Elena Deanda-Camacho

Elena Deanda-Camacho

 

Office Hours

MWF 12:30 to 2:30 and F from 2:30 to 4 PM

Elena Deanda-Camacho is a Professor of Spanish and Black Studies, and the Director of the Black Studies Program at Washington College. She received her BA from the University of Veracruz, Mexico, and her PhD from Vanderbilt University. Besides literature, she has studied philosophy, religion, and medieval studies in Mexico, France, and the USA.
 

Deanda specializes in early modern Spanish literature with an emphasis in the Spanish Enlightenment and colonial Mexico. Her research moves between medieval women’s theology and prostitution in the eighteenth century. Her scholarship and teaching practice interrogates questions about gender, race, and ethnicity; desire, sex, and love; inquisitorial censorship and freedom of speech.

She has published in academic journals in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Spain, Germany, France, and England. Her work has been funded by the Mellon Foundation, the Spanish ministries of Culture, Science, and Innovation, the North American Association of Modern Languages, the Association for the Studies of Eighteenth-Century Studies, the National Fund for Culture and the Arts of Mexico, and the government of Veracruz. 
 
Her 2022 monograph Offensive to pious ears, Obscenity and censorship in eighteenth-century poetry in Spain and New Spain (Iberoamericana/Vervuert) won the 2023 Prize for the Best Monograph given by the Spanish Society of 18th Century Studies (SESXVIII). Her second monograph Trovar: Metapoetics of Occitania and Sotavento will be published in 2023 by the University of Veracruz.
 
She is currently working on a monograph entitled "Pornopoetics" where she theorizes the poetics of pornography in 18th-Century imperial Europe. Deanda is the outgoing president of the Ibero-American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies  (IASECS) and the 2023 recipient of a Fulbright Global Scholar Award in the universities of Bonn in Germany, Oviedo in Spain, and UNAM in Mexico. 
 

Ofensiva a los oidos piadosos

Education

Ph.D., Vanderbilt University, 2010

B.A. University of Veracruz, Mexico, 2001

Research

  • Golden Age, Baroque, and the Enlightenment
  • Gender studies, queer theory, critical race theory, critical theory
  • Spain and Mexico

Teaching

  • How to Make Love in Early Modern Spain 
  • Love and War in the Spanish Golden Age
  • Vice and Virtue in Early Modern Europe 
  • Prehispanic Literature
  • Crusaders, Conquerors, and Immigrants
  • Afro Latin America
  • Tequila Gang: Mexico Across the Centuries
  • Forbidden Literature

Publications

"Bailadoras: Las mujeres y el fandango en España y la Nueva España del siglo 18.” Revista de Estudios de Género y Sexualidades 48.2 (2022): 75-94

“Hell is Over: Poetry and Protest in the Folksong Jarabe Gatuno in Eighteenth Century Mexico.” Protest in the Long Eighteenth Century. Ed. Yvonne Fuentes. New York: Routledge, 2021. 

“Fanny Hill, la pornografía y la novela sentimental: El eslabón faltante en la gesta de la novela inglesa dieciochesca” [Fanny Hill, Pornography and the Sentimental novel: The Missing Link in the Making of the Eighteenth Century English Novel] Nuevas Poligrafías. Revista de Teoría Literaria y Literatura Comparada 3 (2021): 38-56. 

“‘Chingaquedito:’ Son y Subversión en el México del siglo 18” [‘Chingaquedito: Song and Subversion in 18th Century Mexico’]. Música Oral del Sur 17 (2020): 303-21.  

“The Reproduction of Non-Productive Sex: The Brothel as a Site of Learning in English, French, and Spanish Pornologies.” Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert 44.2 (2020): 190-209. 

“La pornología como un instrumento epistemológico en Fanny Hill, Thérèse Philosophe, el Arte de putear y las Décimas a las prostitutas de México” [Pornology as an Epistemological Instrument in Fanny Hill, Thérèse Philosopher, the Art of Whoring, and Poems to Mexican Prostitutes]. Cuadernos de Estudios del Siglo XVIII 30 (2020): 137-64.  

“Dys/Eu-phemisms: The Pornographic and the Erotic in Eighteenth Century Spanish Poetry.” Pornographic Sensibilities. Chad Leahy and Nick Jones, eds. New York: Routledge, 2020. 110-140. 

“Quevedo en México: La lealtad y la traición en las glosas del padrenuestro prohibidas por la Inquisición.” Flavia Gherardi and Miguel Angel Candelas Colodron, eds. Amor constante: Quevedo más allá de la muerte. Bellaterra: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2018. 71-92. 

“Sor Juana, doctora en Teología: la sabiduría y el conocimiento en los villancicos de 1676.” Calíope: Journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry
22.2 (2017): 191-216.

“Quixotic Sade: Echoes of Cervantes in 120 Days of Sodom.” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 46 (2017): 21-33.

“From Hell to Hell: Bodily Regimes and Archival Research in Mexico, Spain, the Vatican, and France” Dieciocho 39.2 (2016): 296-301.

“La fatalidad del poder: La Muerte como el Papa y el Inquisidor en Las Cortes de la Muerte de Micael de Carvajal y Lope de Vega.” Bulletin of Comediantes 67.2 (2015): 157-76.

“Speak in SIlence: The Power of Weakness in the Works of Teresa de Cartagena.” eHumanista 29 (2015): 461-475. 

“Maldito ‘Jarabe Gatuno:’ Poeticas de la censura inquisitorial en la Nueva Espana.” Vanderbilt e-journal of Luso-Hispanic Studies 10 (2014): 25-36. 

“’Introduction’ to Silence Revisited: Censorship, Regulation, and Freedom of Speech,” Vanderbilt e-journal of Luso-Hispanic Studies 10 (2014): i-iii.

“Percances de la memoria: El sujeto y la colectividad en La versada de Arcadio Hidalgo.” Ed. Donaji Cuellar. Literatura de tradicion oral de Mexico: Generos representativos. San Luis-Xalapa: Colegio de San Luis-U of Veracruz, 2012. 197-221. 

 “Maria Candelaria y Oficio de tinieblas. Representando a la mujer indigena en el Mexico del siglo XX.” Semiosis 13.1 (2011): 69-84.

 “The Politics of a Colonial Folksong: Male Bonding, Pardos’ Chuchumbe, and the Inquisitorial Body.” Transverse 10 (2010): 15 pp.

 “El chuchumbé te he de soplar: sobre obscenidad, censura y memoria oral en el primer ‘son de la tierra’ novohispano.” Mester 36 (2007): 53-71.

 “On Joy, Death, and Writing: From Autobiography to Autothanatography in Clarice Lispector’s Works.” Working Papers in Romance Languages 1.1 (2006) Vol. : Iss. 1, Article 5.