Ana Almeyda-Cohen

Education

• Ph.D., Hispanic Studies, University of Pennsylvania
• M.A., Iberian and Latin American Cultures, Stanford University
• B.A., Colgate University

Areas of Expertise

• 20th and 21st-Century Latin American Film,
  with a focus on Mexico and the Caribbean
• Mexican Literature and Culture

Personal Information

Ana Almeyda-Cohen is originally from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. She recently earned her Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Since 2016, she has taught Spanish from Elementary to advanced levels at different institutions of higher education, including Latin American literature and film. Since joining Colby College in 2020, she teaches courses on Latin American cinema and culture. Her research analyzes representations of popular cultural figures within Mexican culture and media and the Caribbean. Her work takes an interdisciplinary approach that draws from critical theories of race and gender, eco-criticism, Mexican visual studies, anthropology, border studies, and Latino/a studies.

Professor Almeyda-Cohen has written on 1980s screen culture in the Dominican Republic and has presented on horror and Mexploitation in Latin American cinema, as well as on gender in Mexican literature. Her current research project traces how filmmakers, artists, and creators repeat and recast women as mediators following the celestina archetype to make sense of love and matchmaking, forced or clandestine sex work, witchcraft, and illicit substances as national topics often complicated by social, political, and racial tensions. The book project asks how Mexican cultural production, namely film, literature, comics, art, photography and newspapers, go beyond their representational function to make the invisible labor and care of women, echoing the work of the 1499 Celestina, visible. Professor Almeyda-Cohen is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and an affiliate of the Latin American Studies Program and the Cinema Studies Program at Colby.

Publications

• “Celestinas in Mexico: Challenging Morality and Narrating Sex Work and Love Magic in Mid-Twentieth-Century Popular Press and Comics” (forthcoming at Hispanófila in 2025)
• “Pedagogical and Methodological Approaches to Latin American Exploitation Cinema,” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies: In Focus “Decolonizing Film Studies
  Curricula: Approaches through Latin American Cinema” (under review)
• “1983, 2 de noviembre en Santo Domingo. El cine lépero mexicano en las salas de barrio de Santo Domingo y las ciudades de las provincias. La cartelera cinematográfica dominicana de los años ochenta,” En la cartelera. Cine y culturas cinematográficas en América Latina, 1896-2020, edited by Alejandro Kelly Hopfenblatt and Nicolás Poppe, Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2022, pp. 335-368.