College of Arts and Humanities

Paula Sanmartín

Professor

Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures | 559.278.8803 | Office: PB517

psanmartin@mail.fresnostate.edu

Education

. University of Texas at Austin - Ph.D. in Comparative Literature with a concentration in African American and Afro-Cuban literature. Portfolio in Women’s and Gender Studies.
. University of Texas at Austin - M.A. in Comparative Literature
. University of California, San Diego - Graduate exchange student and visiting scholar at the Department of Literature (English section)
. Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain - Licenciatura (5-year B.A.) in English Philology and graduate coursework in literature in English.

Courses Taught

COURSES TAUGHT (selected)
AH 100. Honors Seminar. California State University, Fresno.
Afro-Hispanic Women’s Literature: A New Literary Tradition?. Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid. USAC Program. Fall 2013.
Hispanic Women Writers: The Intersections of Gender, Race, Class and Nationality in Spanish-Speaking Women’s Writings. Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid. USAC Program. Fall 2013.
Honors 101: Emerging Voices After Colonialism: Revolution in Theory, Revolution in Practice. Smittcamp Family Honors College. California State University, Fresno.
Span 125: Hispanic Culture. CSU, Fresno
Span 140: Introduction to Literary Analysis. CSU, Fresno
Span 147: Twentieth-Century Spanish-American Literature.
Span 148T (topics course): Afro-Caribbean Identities and Cultures. CSU, Fresno
Span 203 (graduate seminar): Applied Literary Theory.
Span 215 (graduate seminar). Hispanic Women Writers. CSU, Fresno
Span 259 (graduate seminar): The Poetics of Caribbeanness: Cultural Dynamics of Literature and Identity in the Caribbean. CSU, Fresno

Paula Sanmartín is a Professor of (Afro)Spanish and (Afro)Caribbean Literatures. A native Spaniard, she holds a Licenciatura in English Philology from the Complutense University in Madrid, where she was also ABD, having written her M.A. comparative thesis on the novels of manners of American author Edith Wharton and African American author Jessie Fausett. She received a Visiting Scholar Fellowship at the University of California, San Diego to work on her graduate research and subsequently received an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, specializing in African American and Afro-Latin American women's writing, from the University of Texas at Austin. She was the recipient of several fellowships and grants for her dissertation.

After graduating with her Ph.D., Sanmartín worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Indiana University, Bloomington, before coming to teach at Fresno State. Besides teaching courses at the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures, Dr. Sanmartín has taught at the Smittcamp Honors College, and the CAH Honors program, where she was Cohort leader from 2018-2019. From 2016-2020, she was also graduate coordinator and advisor of the M.A. Program in Spanish.

Her publications in English and Spanish have appeared in journals such as MaComere and Revista Iberoamericana, as well as in edited collections on African American and Afro-Caribbean women's literature. She is part of the editorial board of Cubanabooks, which publishes bilingual editions of Cuban women writers' texts. With Cubanabooks she coedited Memoria del Silencio/Memory of Silence (2014) by Uva de Aragón.
Dr. Sanmartín is the author of Black Women as Custodians of History: Unsung Rebel (M)Others in African American and Afro-Cuban Women's Writing (2014). She also is the coeditor of Reading/Speaking/Writing the Mother Text: Essays on Caribbean Women's Writing (2015).

- Black Literatures in the Americas, specializing in the U.S., the Caribbean and Brazil
- Gender and Genre Studies
- Postcolonial Literature and Ethnic Studies

Publications (Selected)

2015 - Reading/Speaking/Writing the Mother Text: Essays on Caribbean Women’s Writing. Eds. Cristina Herrera and Paula Sanmartín. August 2015. Demeter Press.

2014 - Black Women as Custodians of History: Unsung Rebel (M)Others in African American and Afro-Cuban Women’s Writing. May 2014. Cambria Press.

2014 - Memoria del silencio/Memory of Silence. By Uva de Aragón. Eds. Paula Sanmartín and Maria DiFrancesco. Cubananooks.