Dr. Kadiri Vaquer Fernández
Visiting Assistant Professor
Dr. Kadiri Vaquer Fernández is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas, El Paso since fall 2019. She holds a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras (2010), an M.F.A. in Creative Writing in Spanish from NYU (2012), and a Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese from Vanderbilt University (2019). She offers courses in Gender and Popular Culture and Interdisciplinary Feminist Theory and Methods for the Program of Women and Gender Studies, Contemporary Caribbean Literature and Film for the Department of Languages and Linguistics, and Reading and Writing Poetry for the Department of Creative Writing.
Most of her research focuses on contemporary Caribbean cultural production with a special emphasis on Puerto Rican culture and its Diaspora. Her main areas of interest are marginality, provocation, gender and queer studies, and cultural studies. She is especially interested in the way different disenfranchised communities perform dissidence and engage in provocative aesthetics and rhetoric in order to gain visibility and agency while challenging hegemonic culture. The intersections of race, class, gender, sexual identity, nationality, and social justice are central and recurrent themes in her teaching and research.
As an educator, Dr. Vaquer Fernández’ teaching style prioritizes collaborative learning and community building. In this sense, she implements a student-centered teaching approach and strives to be a resource for her students. Her goal is to foster an environment in which a supportive learning community can flourish. She encourages her students to question their assumptions, what is deemed “natural” and “normative” in order to identify the ways socialization and regulation promote compliance with patriarchal, heternormative and white supremacist standards, but also the repercussions of non-compliance.
Besides her extensive teaching experience, she is a founding member and editor of Furman 217 (a multidisciplinary magazine), a literary translator, and a poet. Dr. Vaquer Fernández has published two collections of poetry, Andamiaje (Ediciones Callejón, 2012) and Ritos de pasaje (La Secta de los Perros, 2019), and her poetry has been included in a wide variety of physical and digital anthologies and literary magazines. Her scholarly work has been published by Revista del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, Afro-Hispanic Review, Chasqui, and Instituto Franklin’s Revista Camino Real. She has presented her research at academic conferences in Puerto Rico, the United States, and Spain.