Tace Hedrick
Associate Professor
Tace Hedrick received her BA
in English and Writing from the University of Colorado at Denver and
her MA and PhD in Comparative Literature (20th-century Latin-American and
French Literature and Contemporary Theory) from the University of Iowa.
Before her joint appointment between English and Women’s
Studies at the University of Florida, she taught at Pennsylvania State
University, Harrisburg. She currently offers courses in Chicana/o and
Latina/o literature and theory as well as in Women’s Studies and
feminist theory.
Dr. Hedrick’s book, Mestizo Modernisms: Race, Nation, and Identity in Latin American Culture, 1900–1940 (Rutgers Press, 2003) examines the discourses of mestizaje, modernity, and nationalism in the work of several early 20th century Latin American modernist artists, including the Peruvian poet César Vallejo, Mexican artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral.
Currently Dr. Hedrick is writing her next book, tentatively titled Queering the Cosmic Race: Spirituality, Race, and Sexuality in U.S. Latina/o Artists and Writers, 1970–2000. This project focuses on four U.S. Latina/o artists and writers: the Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta, Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa, Chicano poet Alurista, and Puerto Rican artist Raphael Montañez Ortiz. Dr. Hedrick places these artists within a transnational intellectual and artistic history of people of color of the Americas who have, from the early twentieth century, investigated alternatives to Western spirituality–Eastern, African or Native religions and beliefs, Buddhism, the occult, spiritualism, Theosophy, esoteric knowledges–as a way of reformulating existing social ideas about race, gender, and sexuality. These are artists whose mixed-race heritage and sometimes “queer” sexuality lead them to seek within spiritual and esoteric traditions a language of “newness,” a language of personal as well as social transformation.
Professor Hedrick has published articles on bilingual Chicana/o poetry, U.S. Latinas and popular culture, César Vallejo’s poetry, and Brazilian literature in journals such as The Translator, Latin American Literary Review, and The Luso-Brazilian Review, as well as in collections such as Footnotes: On Shoes and The Returning Gaze: Primitivism and Identity in Latin America.
Contact
- office: Ustler Hall 302
- voice: (352) 273-0390
- fax: (352) 392-0860
- email: <thedrick@wst.ufl.edu>
