Laura Hartmann-Villalta is a white feminist Latina who was born in the Dominican Republic and spent meaningful time in Spain as an adult. She is bicultural and bilingual in Spanish. Her book manuscript in preparation centers on the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), and the foreign women involved in the war who advocated for humanitarian intervention through their work as photographers and writers.
Hartmann-Villalta has been teaching writing at the college level for seventeen years. She has taught courses in business writing, technical writing, writing for arts, media and design majors, and academic writing for ESL learners. Featured in December 2022 on the Pedagogue podcast, Hartmann-Villalta believes mindfulness and reflection are key to mastering transferrable skills in the writing classroom.
From 2023-2024, Hartmann-Villalta served as the Chair of the MLA’s Committee on Contingent Labor in the Profession, actively changing how the MLA recognizes, supports, and represents the scholarship of contingent faculty across the Modern Language Association. With co-organizer Benjamin Hagen, Hartmann-Villalta manages the Modernism and Pedagogy Special Interest Group for the Modernist Studies Association. At Georgetown University, she was appointed as Core Faculty in the Medical Humanities Initiative.
She holds the following degrees: BA in Spanish Philology from St. Louis University, Madrid Campus; MA in English literature from Virginia Tech University; MA in Spanish and Latin American literature from St. Louis University; and a PhD in English literature from Northeastern University.
Hartmann-Villalta is committed to bridging her research interests – gender, the archive, visual culture, public humanities – with how she shapes her courses and student-centered writing pedagogy. She has taught the following courses within the University Writing Program.
Reintroduction to Writing sections:
- Comics, History, Lives
- @BMA: Visual/Text
- Sheridan Libraries Collaboration
- Visual/Textual Lives
Advanced writing courses for sophomores-seniors:
- Community-Engaged Writing: Latino/Jewish Intersections – Jewtina (cross-listed with the Jewish Studies program and the Program in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies)
- Research with the Zombie Apocalypse
- War Writing and Medical Humanities (cross-listed with the Medicine, Science, and the Humanities major)
Selected Publications:
Edited Journal Issues or Online Clusters (Peer-Refereed)
“Precarity, Covid, Caregiving.” (co-edited with Emily C. Bloom). Modernism/modernity Print+ cluster. July 2024. Link here: https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/precarity-caregiving-and-covid
Special Issue, “Feminist Health Humanities” (co-edited with Nicole Infanta Keller), Journal of Integrative and Innovative Humanities. May 2024. Link here: https://so07.tci-thaijo.org/index.php/DJIIH/issue/view/449
Book chapter (Peer-Refereed)
“Writing Guernica, Dancing Spain: How US Poets and Artists Reacted to the Spanish Civil War and the War’s Legacy in the 20th Century.” Ed. José Manuel Rodríguez Herrera, Anne Day Dewey, Cristina Gámez Fernández. The Spanish and Latin American Legacy in North American Poetry and Art. Peter Lang. 2024. 117-134.
Invited Book Reviews
Review of Mosaic Fictions: Writing Identity in the Spanish Civil War by Emily Robins Sharpe. Modernism/modernity, vol. 30, no. 3. September 2023. pp. 636-648. https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2023.a920263
Review of Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century by Rowena Kennedy-Epstein. Feminist Modernist Studies, vol. 7, 1. 2023. pp. 52-55. https://doi.org/10.1080/24692921.2023.2237738
Non-Peer-Refereed Publications
“How I Talk about Activism without Talking about Activism”; https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/hartmann-villalta-how-i-talk-about-activism; Modernism/modernity Print Plus. January 2022.
Media:
Hartmann-Villalta, L. (2022, December). Laura Hartmann-Villalta. Pedagogue Podcast. (Episode 132)
Spanish Civil War, modernism, war writing, medical humanities, life writing, visual culture (photography, museums, comics), labor issues in the academy, critical university studies, women’s & gender studies, Latin-Jewish studies – and the overlap thereof!
Hartmann-Villalta is a member of the editorial boards of the academic journals Feminist Modernist Studies and The Space Between: Literature & Culture 1914-1945.
She is the Inaugural Editor of the feature “From the Feminist Classroom” for Feminist Modernist Studies, which publishes pedagogical reflections on feminist modernist studies in the classroom in the area of 2,500-6,250 words.
She is a member of the:
- Feminist inter/Modernist Association
- Modernist Studies Association
- Modern Language Association