Monique Balbuena

Monique Balbuena is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon, affiliated with the College of Arts and Sciences. She is a participating faculty member in the Romance Languages department and actively involved in the Jewish Studies program, serving on its executive committee, as well as the Latin American Studies program, where she was interim director in 2014-15, and the Women and Gender Studies program.

• Ph.D., University of California - Berkeley, 2003
• M.A., Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1993
• B.A., Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1988

Her research focuses on how multilingual writers construct identity through language choice and intertexts, particularly in Sephardic Jewish literatures and Ladino language. She examines works from the Maghreb and Latin America, analyzing minority languages' roles in reshaping canonical narratives. Balbuena is fluent in Portuguese, English, French, Spanish, Hebrew, Ladino, and Italian, with functional knowledge of Arabic, Catalan, Galician, and Yiddish.

Her publications explore themes like Ladino's cultural representation in Latin America, transnational Sephardic identity, and bilingual poetry. She is currently working on two book projects: Sephardic Literary Responses to the Holocaust and Ladino Today: Cultural Representation, Language Revival and National Identity.

Scientific awards include the Starr Fellowship at Harvard's Center for Jewish Studies. She serves on editorial boards for The Journal of Jewish Identities, The Levantine Review, and The Journal for the Study of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewry, and is editor of modern literature for The Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World.