About
A native from Perú, Rocío Quispe-Agnoli is Professor of Hispanic Studies with a specialization in Colonial Latin American Literatures and Cultures in the
Department of Romance and Classical Studies at Michigan State University (MSU). She is a core faculty member for the
Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and affiliated faculty in the
American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program and the Program of
Global Studies in the Arts and Humanities.
Since January 2020, she is the Editor in Chief of
REGS/Journal of Gender and Sexuality Studies, sponsored by Romance and Classical Studies and the College of Arts & Letters.
Her research interests include issues of race, ethnicity, and identity, women’s and gender studies, visual studies and circulation of images among different media, Indigenous photographers, reflections on coloniality, and television and telenovela studies. Since 2019, she is studying Peruvian and Latin American speculative fiction (science fiction, literatura fantástica, literatura oscura/horror literature).
Rocío Quispe-Agnoli is also a creative writer and has published a
book of short stories. Her short fiction has earned her several awards and she is a founding member of
Qhipa Pacha-Andean Futurism (2021-present), a collective of writers of Peruvian speculative fiction that depart from and reflect on ancestral knowledge of Peru’s pre-hispanic indigenous cultures.
Her work is interdisciplinary and seeks understanding of representation and perception of similarities and differences, keeping in mind intersectionality. Thus, she works in the intersection and liminal spaces of self/other as well as the unavoidable intersections of race, gender, sexuality, belief systems (faith), and other identifiers of the human subject. Her reflection is not limited to the Spanish-speaking world–it goes over various creative genres including sci-fi, fanfic, OTW, ao3 and the use of self/other in the creation of alternate/outer worlds. Quispe Agnoli is also a fiction writer of speculative fiction (under the name of Rocío Qespi) and a scifi fanfic writer (under the name Chaska Quntur).
She is also an amateur photographer and won the
2011 MSU Global Focus Competition-People’s Choice Award. Every four years, she avidly follows the Soccer World Cup.
Areas of interest: Colonial Latin American Studies, Interdisciplinary studies, Digital Humanities, Digital Pedagogy, Visual Studies, Television Studies, Studies of Dispersion and Randomness-Postmodern condition, Speculative Fiction in Peru and Latin America (Science Fiction, Dark Fantasy, Literatura Fantástica), Postcolonial Studies and Studies of Subalternity, Indigeneity, Gender, Oral/Written, Identity and Otherness.
Other Publications
Publications | Books
Latin American Literature in Transition, pre-1492-1800. Ed. Rocío Quispe-Agnoli & Amber Brian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. (148,146 words, 9 illustrations).
Women’s Negotiations and Textual Agency in Latin America, 1500-1799. Ed. Mónica Díaz & Rocío Quispe-Agnoli. New York: Routledge, 2017. (83,216 words, chart).
Even though women had been historically underrepresented in official histories and literary and artistic traditions, their voices and writings can be found in abundance in the many archives of the world where they remain to be uncovered. The present volume seeks to recover women’s voices and actions while studying the mechanisms through which they authorized themselves and participated in the creation of texts and documents found in archives of colonial Latin America.
Available in
Routledge and
Amazon.
Nobles de papel: Identidades oscilantes y genealogías borrosas en los descendientes de la realeza Inca. Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2016. (82,814 words, 8 illustrations, 3 charts, 1 map)
2017 Flora Tristan Book Award, LASA-Peru Section
This book examines the oscillating identities of the colonial descendants of Inca kings in the eighteenth-century borders of the Spanish empire, by means of discursive analysis of the petitions of nobility by the Uchu Túpac Yupanqui family of Lambayeque, Perú. The unpublished manuscript of such record, classified as
Mexico 2346 in Seville’s Archivo General de Indias, depicts the twelve-year legal and social journey of doña María Joaquina Uchu Inca in viceregal Mexico. The study of written and visual iconic texts reveals the history of the Uchu Túpac Yupanqui family from 1544 to 1801.
For more information, visit: “
La historia de María Joaquina Uchu, una noble inca en México del siglo XVIII” Interview with Javier Torres Seoane. In addition to
Iberoamericana Vervuert, available in
Libros Peruanos (Perú);
Librería Sur(Perú); and
Amazon.
La fe andina en la escritura: identidad y resistencia en la obra de Guamán Poma de Ayala. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 2006. (90,027 words, 35 illustrations).
“This book is one of the best examples of interdisciplinary work. Discursive and Visual Semiotics, Critical textual analysis and historiographical research come together to approach the work of the distinguished Andean author of sixteenth-century Peru, don Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala. Quispe-Agnoli observes the author’s obsession with the Spanish script and how it affects the recording and transmission of information in the Andean world. The analysis of Guamán Poma’s use of alphabetic writing in his verbal and iconic reflections of the Spanish-Andean colonial world follows. The book concludes with a reflection on the political and economic power of alphabetic writing , and the colonization of Andean record-keeping system by the Spanish script in Guamán Poma’s times” (Marcel Velázquez, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos). Available in
Libros Peruanos (Perú)
Durmiendo en el agua (short fiction). Lima: Mundo Ajeno Editores, 2008. “This is
R. Qespi‘s (aka R. Quispe-Agnoli) first collection of short fiction. The eight short stories in this book deal with love in multiple variants,
tanathos–love’s relation with death–and children’s gaze. The characters in these stories defy in very subtle ways social rules of the dominant patriarchal hierarchy. Children (especially “
niñas“) and women who fall in love, look at, remember and reconstruct theirs and the family past, who confront male power, and adults who think their lives away from what society rules as “normal” and “usual,” come together in this collection and let us know what they think, what they see, hear and feel, and their final choices.” (José Donayre,
Presentación). Available in
Amazon.
Publications | Invited Editor of Monographic Issues
Más allá de los 400 años: Guamán Poma de Ayala revisitado. Monographic issue. Letras. Revista de Investigación de la Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos. 91,133 (2020) 316 pages. (12 essays, 30 illustrations). In collaboration with Carlos García Bedoya.
Mirrors and Mirages: Women’s Gaze as an Artistic Topos in Hispanic Letters. Co-edited with María Claudia André. Monographic issue. CIEHL-International Journal of Humanistic Studies and Literature, Vol. 22 (2015).
Monographic issue. Includes one Introduction, nine essays and one short fiction. Published by the Universidad de Puerto Rico-Humacao. Introduction “Mirrors and Mirages: Women’s Gaze in Hispanic Literature and Visual Arts” co-authored by María Claudia André and Rocío Quispe-Agnoli.
Women’s Gaze: Visual Narratives and Narrations of the Visual in the Luso-Hispanic World. Co-edited with María Claudia André. Special issue Letras Femeninas, 40.1 (Summer 2014).
This special issue seeks to explore how visual/iconic narratives from women’s authors and characters interact with their written counterparts to convey views and perceptions of the women’s experience in the Hispanic world across time. The relationship between individuals and their writings of both, their intimate and public worlds, is undoubtedly connected to their visual experiences and what Nicholas Mirzoeff calls “visual practices.” Articles in this special issue bring visual art analysis and literary studies together by showing the interrelation between the visual image, the ‘ars rhetorica’ and written texts that either depart from visual images or are used for the production of iconic images and imagery.
Beyond the Convent Walls/Más alla del convento. Monographic issue CIEHL-International Journal of Humanistic Studies and Literature, Vol 5 (2005-2006).
This collection of articles on colonial women’s studies beyond the convent walls, has a special focus on women’s daily lives and challenges in Spanish America. It includes 10 essays in addition to an introduction by the editor, “Más allá del convento: voces femeninas coloniales y desafíos diarios en Hispanoamérica.”
