Monica Styles

Monica Styles is assistant professor of Spanish at Howard University in Washington, D.C. She received her Ph.D. from University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her research focus is representations of Africans and people of African descent in early modern and modern Caribbean and Latin American literature. She is completing a book project Recuperating Black Perspectives from the Early Modern Caribbean, under contract with Vanderbilt University Press, that explores the Black literary tradition beginning in the porous geography of the Spanish Caribbean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She applies critical Black theory and Black feminist theory to trace how Black voices in texts are part of a broader Black literary tradition. She is also advancing research for two chapters of a second book manuscript on the Afro-Peruvian presence in colonial cultural production in the seventeenth century through analysis of the intersections of race and gender in writing about and by Afro-Peruvian healers. The purpose of this research is to build on recent scholarship to include voices that have been historically underrepresented in colonial Latin American literature more broadly. She has published in journals including The Afro-Hispanic Review, Hispania, and Colonial Latin American Review.