Paola S. Hernández

Credentials: ITS Program Director | Professor, Spanish and Portuguese

Position title: ITS Faculty

Pronouns: she/her

Email: pshernandez@wisc.edu

close-up of Professor Hernandez smiling

Biography

Paola S. Hernández specializes in contemporary Latin American theatre, performance, and Latinx Studies. She has published numerous articles on Southern Cone theatre, performance and memory politics, sites of memory, human rights, and documentary theatre. She is the author of Staging Lives in Latin American Theater: Bodies-Objects-Archives (Northwestern University Press, 2021); El teatro de Argentina y Chile: Globalización, resistencia y desencanto (Corregidor, 2009); co-editor with Analola Santanta of Fifty Key Figures in Latinx and Latin American Theatre (Routledge 2022); with Pamela Brownell of Biodrama/Proyecto Archivos: seis documentales escénicos by Vivi Tellas (Papeles Teatrales, Universidad de Córdoba, 2018), as well as co-editor (with Brenda Werth and Florian Becker) of Imagining Human Rights in Twenty-First-Century Theater: Global Perspectives (Palgrave, 2013). Her current research project is tentatively titled (In)Visible Bodies: Performing Rights on the US-Mexico Border. As an affiliate of Chicanx and Latinx Studies, and a core member of Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies, she teaches a variety of courses on visual arts, migration and border studies, as well as theatre and performance studies of the Americas, and has staged a variety of Latin American plays on campus. She is Director of Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies, Graduate Studies Director in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese, and Executive Committee member of the American Society of Theatre Research (ASTR).

https://wisc.academia.edu/PaolaHernandez

Education

PhD University of Kansas

Honors and Awards

2023-2024. Mellon-Morgridge Professor, Univresity of Wisconsin-Madison

2021-2022.  Mellon-Borghesi Workshop Grant, Center for the Humanities, University of Wisconsin-Madison

2018. Institute for Research in the Humanities: Summer Research Funding and Next Book Workshop, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

2016-17. Vilas Associate Award, The Graduate School, University of Wisconsin.

2016. Resident Fellow, Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin.

2010. Premio Teatro del Mundo. First Prize Award granted by the Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas from the Universidad de Buenos Aires, for El teatro en Argentina y Chile: Globalización, resistencia y desencanto.