Caroline Colquhoun

Assistant Professor of Spanish

Caroline Beard Colquhoun holds a dual PhD in Spanish Literature and Comparative Media Analysis & Practice from Vanderbilt University. She specializes in contemporary literature, media, and culture from the Iberian Peninsula and the Global Hispanophone—Spanish-speaking areas beyond Spain and Latin America—, specifically, Equatorial Guinea and the Western Sahara.

Her current book project analyzes a corpus of contemporary cultural productions from Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea, two former Spanish colonies in Africa. The project traces how younger generations of Equatoguineans and Sahrawis are responding, through art and activism, to the daily challenges of life in societies marked by lengthy dictatorships, neocolonial exploitation, and ongoing illegal annexation.

Caroline’s areas of inquiry include migration, economic crisis, historical memory, gender, sexuality, human rights, and decoloniality. As a scholar with an interest in digital humanities, she has produced academic and public-facing work using video, virtual reality, and mapping software to expand approaches to literature and to interrogate a range of inherent biases in technology.

Caroline was a 2020-2021 Andrew W. Mellon Fellow for Digital Humanities, a 2022-2023 fellow at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University, and she served as Assistant Editor for Afro-Hispanic Review from 2019-2020. Her research is published in Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, La Revista de ALCESXXI, and Divergencias, and she has a forthcoming chapter in a Routledge edited volume on Hispanophone comics.