Dr. Marion Christina Rohrleitner
After graduating with a PhD in English from The University of Notre Dame, I joined UTEP as Assistant Professor in Fall 2007 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2013. I teach courses on twentieth and twenty-first century American literatures, with special attention to Chicanx and Latinx literatures and cultures, the Caribbean diaspora, literature of the Americas, and world literature. As an immigrant who grew up near the Austrian-Italian border and as a scholar whose main research interests include Latinx literatures, translation, affect and queer theory, and the relationship between ethnic American literature, historiography, and visual culture, I am excited to live in the US-Mexico borderlands and work with students whose daily lives are characterized by multiple border crossings.
My interdisciplinary collection, Dialogues Across Diasporas: Women Writers, Scholars, and Activists of Africana and Latina Descent in Conversation, co-edited with Sarah E. Ryan, was published by Lexington Books in December 2012 (shorturl.at/ghx24). Haitian Revolutionary Fictions (University of Virginia Press, 2022), co-authored and co-edited with Marlene L. Daut and Gregory Pierrot, is dedicated to the original translation and contextualization of 200 literary responses to the Haitian Revolution in French, German, Haitian Kreyol, Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish that were published in Europe and the Americas between 1787 and 1899. I am currently completing Transnational Latinidades, a monograph focused on theorizing and understanding the politics and poetics of translating, writing, studying, and marketing contemporary Chicanx and Latinx literatures in the European Union. Transnational Latinidades is under contract with the Global Latin/o Americas series at the Ohio State University Press. Part of this work in progress was published in Symbolism.
My scholarship has also been published in American Quarterly, Antípodas, Callaloo, El Mundo Zurdo, Latino Studies, MELUS, The European Journal of American Studies, and The Oxford Bibliographies in Latino Studies. Examples of recent scholarly essays are "Refusing the Referendum: Queer Latino Masculinities and Utopian Citizenship in Justin Torres’ We the Animals," "Undocumented Magic: Magical Realism as ‘Aesthetic Turbulence’ in Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper,'" and "Black Butterflies: Survival, Transformation, and the Invention of Home in Edwidge Danticat's Fiction and Nonfiction."
I have presented my research at the annual conferences of the ASA, ACLA, HSA, LASA, LSA, MELUS, MESEA and International MLA Symposium, and I serve as the current president of the MLA's LLC Latina and Latino Forum's Executive Committee. At UTEP I teach courses in American Literature (1865 to the present), American Fiction 1945 to the Present, Chicanx Literature, Caribbean Literature, African American Literature, Literature and Film, World literature, and Literature of the Americas.
*Listen to my co-editor Dr. Marlene L. Daut's interview on our book Haitian Revolutionary Fictions
Contact Information
Email: mcrohrleitner@utep.edu
Phone: 915-747-5647
Hudspeth Hall 321
Publications