People Core Faculty Affiliated Faculty Staff Graduate Students

Tace Hedrick

E-mail

thedrick@wst.ufl.edu

Key Research Areas

Chicana/o & Latina/o Cultural Studies; Afro-Latino/a Cultural Studies; Feminist Theory; Transnational American Intellectual History; Feminist Art History; Women’s Studies

Biography

Associate Professor Tace Hedrick received her B.A. in English and Writing from the University of Colorado at Denver and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (20th-century Latin-American and French Literature and Contemporary Theory) from the University of Iowa. Before her joint appointment between English and Women’s Studies at the University of Florida, she taught at Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg. She currently offers courses in Chicana/o and Latina/o literature and theory as well as in Women’s Studies and feminist theory.

Dr. Hedrick’s book, Mestizo Modernisms: Race, Nation, and Identity in Latin American Culture, 1900–1940 (Rutgers Press, 2003) examines the discourses of mestizaje, modernity, and nationalism in the work of several early 20th century Latin American modernist artists, including the Peruvian poet César Vallejo, Mexican artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral.

Currently Dr. Hedrick is writing her next book, tentatively titled Queering the Cosmic Race: Spirituality, Race, and Sexuality in U.S. Latina/o Artists and Writers, 1970–2000. This project focuses on four U.S. Latina/o artists and writers: the Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta, Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa, Nuyorican artist Raphael Montañez Ortiz, and Puerto Rican television personality and astrologist Walter Mercado. Dr. Hedrick places these artists within a transnational intellectual and artistic history of people of color of the Americas who have, from the early twentieth century, investigated alternatives to Western spirituality–Eastern, African or Native religions and beliefs, Buddhism, the occult, spiritualism, Theosophy, esoteric knowledges–as a way of reformulating existing social ideas about race, gender, and sexuality. These are artists whose mixed-race heritage and sometimes queer sexuality lead them to seek within spiritual and esoteric traditions images of sexual and racial unity and a language of personal and social transformation.

Professor Hedrick has published articles on transnational Latino/a and Latin American intellectual history, queerness and esotericism in U.S. Latino/a and Latin American writers, bilingual Chicana/o poetry and translation, U.S. Latinas and popular culture, César Vallejo, and Brazilian literature in journals such as Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, The Translator, Latin American Literary Review, and The Luso-Brazilian Review, as well as in collections such as Footnotes: On Shoes and The Returning Gaze: Primitivism and Identity in Latin America.