Olga López-Cotín

Olga López Cotín (Ph.D.) is Senior Lecturer and Head of the Spanish Program at the Residential College, University of Michigan. Her areas of research and teaching have focused on cultural and artistic manifestations in contemporary Latin American and Spanish societies that emerge as acts of resistance to institutional discourses. She has developed seminars in Spanish that delve into gender, writing and art issues in 20th century Latin America, and others that inquiry into definitions of national identity in Spain since its Civil War (1936-1939) and dictatorship (1939-1975), and its increasing cultural heterogeneity stemming from government decentralization, a widely diverse immigrant population and the active inclusion of gitanos into civic life. Most recent seminars have focused on Latin American and Spanish cities as multidimensional networks where human dynamics may reaffirm the nature of core democratic values. She has collaborated in educational projects such as Cultures in Dialogue: Crossing External and Internal Boundaries in Europe and translations for the Law School Human Trafficking Clinic where the interplay of social studies, arts and humanities facilitate new definitions of cosmopolitanism and hybridization resulting from the constant human flow of our contemporary societies.