Cristina Pérez-Arranz

Dr. Cristina Pérez-Arranz, a native of Madrid, Spain, pursued advanced graduate studies at both the University of California, Davis, and Harvard University. Since 2017, she has held academic appointments in the Boston area, where she has been the recipient of multiple commendations for pedagogical excellence, including the Harvard University Awards for Distinction and Excellence in Teaching. Her teaching praxis engages deeply with Spanish language instruction as well as the critical study of Iberian and Latin American literature and culture. She is the coeditor of Wall to Wall: Law as Culture in Latin America and Spain (2022), a volume that interrogates the juridical imagination through a cultural lens, and she has published prolifically in the fields of literary criticism and second language pedagogy. She is committed to transforming the meaning and impact of higher education in Massachusetts by making college education more accessible to people who are incarcerated. Since 2021, she has been teaching Spanish at MCI-Concord and MCI-Norfolk, state-run prisons, where she continues to advocate for educational equity through language instruction. Dr. Pérez-Arranz’s scholarly inquiries are principally concerned with Spanish cultural production and the aesthetic and discursive configurations of precarity, with a particular emphasis on narratives of poverty, material deprivation, and hunger.