Mary Katherine Newman is a postdoctoral associate in humanities leadership at the Whitney Humanities Center. She specializes in early modern Spanish American literature and sensory studies, with a particular focus on the colonization of Chile. Her current book project, An Assault on the Senses: The Five Senses in the Literature of the Arauco War, examines how Spanish soldiers understood sensory experience as a form of evidence and used knowledge gathered on the imperial frontier to make embodied arguments about colonial warfare and imperial politics. Her doctoral thesis received an honorable mention for the Maureen Ahern Doctoral Dissertation Award from the colonial section of the Latin American Studies Association. Her research has appeared in Hispanic Review and The Routledge History of the Senses. She was previously coordinator of Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation (OCCT) at the University of Oxford and Quirk Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London.
