Dr. KC Barrientos is a native of New York. After obtaining her BA/MA, summa cum laude, in Spanish Literature and Latin American & Caribbean Studies, from the University at Albany, she won a Presidential Fellowship at the University of Notre Dame, where she earned her PhD in Spanish and Portuguese Literatures. Having always been enamored of poetry and cinema and compelled by the contemporary struggles of women in interracial and migratory spaces, Dr. Barrientos wrote her dissertation, Bodies Remembered, as an exposition of female suffering and reclamation in a canon of 20^th- and 21^st-century feminist poets from the Spanish Afro-Caribbean. In recognition of her dissertation work, Dr. Barrientos was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship to teach her specialization at Notre Dame.

Throughout her years of teaching and research, Dr. Barrientos has led seminars on the Central American and Caribbean diasporas; race and human rights; Fanonist evocations of decoloniality; and the problematics of borders and postcolonial tourism. In addition to Frantz Fanon, other writers she finds foundational to her thought and work are Michel Foucault, Angela Davis, Gloria Anzaldúa, Gayatri Spivak, and Gustavo Pérez-Firmat on the social power of the marginalized to speak multiple languages and cultures. She is most compelled by the bilingual poetry of Elizabeth Acevedo, on whose work she published an award-winning article, “‘Stranded’: Interrogating the Shame of the Afro-Latina Female Body.”

Dr. Barrientos has taught SPAN122: Basic Proficiency in Spanish Honors, a culminating requirement for all USC students which emphasizes communication and reading comprehension through extensive conversation activities, authentic audiovisual content on Hispanic religious and cultural practice, and in-class compositions in the target language; and SPAN210: Intermediate Spanish II Honors, which hones Spanish competency through a variety of assessments, such as oral presentations on Hispanic art and persuasive epistolary projects on social issues. Currently, Dr. Barrientos teaches SPAN303: Cultural Readings and Advanced Composition Honors. This writing-intensive course surveys Latin American and Spanish literature, art, and cinema from Precolumbian production through the 15^th-century colonial Encounter, Latin American independence, the fantastic Boom, and 20^th-century migration, to the crisis of contemporary imperialism. Upon successful completion of the class, students will have gained a panoramic understanding of the historical and cultural intersections between the Spanish-speaking world and the West, and will have mastered the foundational skills of close reading, literary critique, art analysis, literary device interpretation, and cogent argumentation. Most importantly, students will learn to write a variety of formal genres in an elevated Spanish vernacular, including creative short narratives, original poetry, film critiques, epistolary reactions, and argumentative research papers. In all the courses she teaches, Dr. Barrientos has been commended for her dynamic pedagogy and interdisciplinary expertise.