Rebecca Janzen

Rebecca Janzen is a Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina in Columbia and Humboldt Foundation Experienced Research Fellow at the German Mining Museum in Bochum, Germany (2025-2027). She is a scholar of gender, disability and religious studies in Mexican literature and culture whose research focuses on excluded populations in Mexico. Her first book, The National Body in Mexican Literature: Collective Challenges to Biopolitical Control (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015), explored images of disability and illness in 20th century texts. Her second book, Liminal Sovereignty: Mennonites and Mormons in Mexican Culture (SUNY, 2018), focuses on religious minorities and her third book, Unholy Trinity: State, Church and Film in Mexico (SUNY, 2021), examines religion in Mexican film and her fourth, Unlawful Violence: Mexican Law and Cultural Production analyzes constitutional reforms, and human rights in legal and literary texts (Vanderbilt UP, 2022). Her research has been supported by the Plett Foundation, the Kreider Fellowship at Elizabethtown College, the C Henry Smith Peace Trust, the Newberry library in Chicago, the Marian Library at the University of Dayton and the Humboldt Foundation.