DEPARTMENT OF SPANISH & PORTUGUESE

Stephen McNabb, Ph.D. '25,  is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University. He instructs courses in Spanish language, literature, and culture covering pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial Latin America as well as courses regarding the Spanish Golden Age and contemporary Peninsular literature and media. His courses bring fresh perspectives to the study of canonical texts by privileging non-Western perspectives and ways of thinking. Through an interdisciplinary approach to literary analysis grounded in anthropological and sociological discourse, Stephen promotes new ways of thinking about, reading, and analyzing literatures produced from outside the hegemony of Western thinking and practice. In this way, students in his courses develop creative and critical thinking skills through forms of analysis and criticism requiring

Stephen's principal area of investigation is contemporary Latin American Indigenous studies (namely Andean and Amazonian epistemologies) with attention to twentieth century Peruvian literature and the representation of Indigenous cultures, languages, and knowledges in genres like indigenismo and testimonio. Other areas of interest include colonial-era textual production, literary theory, translation studies, and comic studies. He is primarily interested in understanding how Indigenous voices articulate local knowledge in traditionally Western spaces like the novel. Through revealing submerged expressions of local knowledge woven into dominant literary productions, his research shows how such narrative and discursive gestures become strategies of social, even epistemic, resistance.

Stephen has attained funding from multiple renowned institutions, including fellowships with the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Mellon Foundation, as well as the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies, the Cook Family Writing Program Fellow, and the Foreign Language and Area Studies program supported by the U.S. Department of Education. His writing has been featured in publications such as Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana, Peripherica, and Latin American Caribbean and Iberian Studies (LACIS) Review. In 2023, he collaborated with Dr. Jorge Coronado on Anarquismos y marxismos en Bolivia, Ecuador y Perú (Ediciones Achawata), an anthology of left-leaning writings regarding issues of political sovereignty, social justice, and equal rights in the Andes. His current book project develops a critical reading practice regarding literatures produced from non-Western knowledge systems and narrative logics.