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Valérie Benoist is a professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies specializing in colonial literature. She teaches for the Spanish Department as well as for the Latin American Studies Concentration. Her course offerings include  Introduction to Latin American Studies (in English) as well as courses in Spanish in language, culture, and colonial and nineteenth-century Latin American literature. Her research centers on gender and race construction. She has published on nuns’ writing as well as historiographies written by indigenous peoples.  Her most recent publications have been on the representation of blackness in colonial literature. She is currently examining the discourse about religious exemplarity and sanctity in the biographies about early-modern Afro Spanish and Latin American nuns.  Her works have been published in journals such as Estudios de Cultura Nahuatl, Latin American Theater Review, Revista de Estudios Hispanicos, Letras Femeninas, Moenia, Afro-Hispanic Review, and The Publication of Afro- Latin American Research Association.