Erika Almenara

Erika Almenara serves as an Assistant Professor of Spanish within the Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Arkansas.

Her research centers on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American cultural production, with a focus on marginalized communities in Chile and Peru. She investigates how writers who identify as travesti, trans, cuir/queer, and Indigenous employ nonnormative gender and sexuality discourse to challenge state-led modernization projects and assert agency against erasure. This work positions liminal identities as transformative forces in social critique, using literary production to expose systemic oppression and subvert national narratives built on cultural annihilation.