Paola Uparela is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Florida. She holds a Ph.D. in Spanish from the University of Notre Dame, where she received the 2020 Eli J. and Helen Shaheen Graduate School Award in Humanities. She specializes in Early Modern Transatlantic studies, gender and sexuality, indigenous studies, visual culture, and biopolitics. Her research examines the colonial emergence of the visual regimes of the female body in medicine, literature, and art and the historical, material, and symbolic violence that made the female body ultra-visible, intelligible, and reducible to the sexual and reproductive organs and functions. Her first book Colonial Invaginations. Gaze, Genitality, and (de)generation in the Early Modernity (2024) received the Klaus D. Vervuert Essay Award (2023) by the Cervantes Institute and Iberoamericana Vervuert.
Paola Uparela’s research on the representation of female bodies and the issue of the reproduction and well-being of the indigenous population in Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Corónica (1615) and Bartolomé de Las Casas’s works has received academic recognitions such as the 2023 LASA - José María Arguedas Essay Award, the 2022 LASA - Culture, Power & Politics Essay Award, and the 2018 Victoria Urbano Award by the Association of Gender and Sexuality Studies. Recently, her work on the different archival accounts regarding Catalina de Erauso’s virginity verification received the 2023 SECOLAS Essay Award and two honorable mentions for the 2023 LASA Sexualities - Sylvia Molloy Best Article Award and the 2023 LASA - Visual Culture Award. She has been invited to present her research as a keynote speaker at Yale University and the John Carter Brown Library in 2023, and as an invited speaker at the Centre for the Study of Medicine and the Body in the Renaissance, Johns Hopkins University, Berna University, the Kellogg Institute, and Georgetown University, among others.