News & Updates

Serrano Publishes Book Chapter in MLA Teaching Volume

March 22, 2022

Associate Director for Digital Learning and Research Nhora Lucía Serrano recently published a peer-reviewed chapter on “Casting Inca Garcilaso, Comparatively Speaking” in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. The book is part of the Modern Language Association (MLA) series Approaches to Teaching World Literature.

The volume focuses on the works by the writer Inca Garcilaso (Cuzco 1539-1616), son of a Spanish conquistador and an Incan princess. According to the publisher’s description, the book’s 21 essays from top literary scholars in the field of Colonial Latin America provide “guidance on the translations of Garcilaso’s writings and on the scholarly reception of his ideas.”

Serrano’s chapter looks at “The Story of Pedro Serrano” from Royal Commentaries of the Incas. She proposes that “The Story of Pedro Serrano” complicates and enriches the students’ understanding of other well-taught primary texts —Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe — in early modern and colonial literary courses that are dedicated to the travel narrative, cultural identity, and the castaway theme.

She said her essay brings “The Story of Pedro Serrano” to the forefront of course design, and prevents it from being an overlooked and forgotten narrative of a castaway through the use of visual and digital assignments.

According to the MLA website, its books “support teachers and students in writing, research, language instruction, literary studies, and related fields at postsecondary and secondary institutions.”