Rate My Professor Mercedes Rodriguez

Mercedes Lopez Rodriguez serves as Spanish Program Director and Associate Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of South Carolina, where she joined the faculty in 2013 as Assistant Professor of Colonial Spanish American Literature. Prior to her current position, she taught at Georgetown University as a teaching instructor from 2006 to 2013 and at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Colombia from 2000 to 2006. A native of Colombia, she earned her B.A. with honors in Social Anthropology from Universidad Nacional de Colombia-Bogotá in 1999. She then pursued graduate studies at Georgetown University, obtaining an M.S. in Spanish Literature and Cultural Studies in 2008 and a Ph.D. in 2013. Her dissertation, “Racial Fictions: Building Representations of Race and Gender through Literature and Visual Arts in Colombia 1830-1875,” was honored with the Harold N. Glassman Award for the best dissertation in Humanities at Georgetown.

Dr. Lopez Rodriguez specializes in Spanish American literature from the 16th to 19th centuries, with research interests encompassing literature and visual arts, race and cultural difference in Spanish America, post-colonial literatures in the Andes, food studies, disgust studies, and senses and emotions in Latin America. Her interdisciplinary scholarship, at the intersection of literary studies, ethnography, history, and art history, explores racialized representations of Andean peasants and the textual construction of racial categories. She has authored two books: Blancura y otras ficciones raciales en los Andes colombianos del siglo XIX (Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2019) and Tiempos para rezar y tiempos para trabajar: La cristianización de las comunidades muiscas durante el siglo XVI (ICANH, 2001). Selected publications include the chapter “Racial Fictions: Constructing Whiteness in Nineteenth Century Colombian Literature” in A History of Colombian Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2016), and recent articles “Romanticism beyond the Grave: The Exhumation of Jorge Isaacs’s Body and the Political Modernization of the Romantic Hero in Early Twentieth-Century Colombia” (Comparative Literature Journal, 2025) and “Food Encounters in the Tropics and the Andes” (2025). She has translated works such as Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Andes (2017). Awards include the McCausland Faculty Fellowship (2019-2022) and ICANH’s Best Work in Colonial History (2001). As Chair of the Latino/Hispanic Faculty Caucus, she engages in university service and has directed several Ph.D. dissertations and M.A. theses. Current projects include Sensing and Feeling the Other: Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching Emotions in Colombia 1850-1970 and stories of Colombian immigrants in South Carolina.