Dr. Iliana Portaro has been teaching at SUU since 2011. She is currently an Associate Professor of Spanish and teaches language (all levels), Latin American literature, film, and culture. She is an affiliated faculty member of the Women and Gender Studies Program.

Dr. Portaro received her B.A. (English and Spanish/ Minor in Latin American Studies) from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2004. She later received an M.A. (2007) and Ph.D. (2013) in Latin American Literatures and Cultures from the University of California, Davis.

Her specializations include 19th and 20th-century Latin American literature, women’s studies, the intersection between literature and journalism, non-fictional genres, and Peruvian literature. Her research analyzes the works of female Peruvian intellectuals at the beginning of the twentieth century and how journalism is used as a place of encounters and transgressions, crucial for the formation of a female intellectual subjectivity. Through the study of the printed press and the utilization of so-called minor genres –letters, chronicles, pamphlets, interviews, editorials, manifestos, essays, and (auto) biographical texts, she analyzes how female writers, such as Magda Portal, Angela Ramos, Maria Wiesse, and Blanca Luz Brum, negotiated and positioned themselves in the public sphere and the labor market.