Stephanie M. López (she/ella) is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Romance Studies with a focus on 20^th and 21^stcentury Latin American literature and film and a minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her dissertation, Birthing a Common Mother calls for a re-evaluation of maternity as a practice of daily transgression. Her work has been supported by Humanities New York, the Latin American and Caribbean Studies program and the Society for the Humanities as a Mellon Graduate Fellow and recipient of a Dissertation Writing Grant at Cornell University. 

Her dissertation, Birthing a Common Mother: Maternity, Kinship and Futures in Contemporary Latin America, calls for a re-evaluation of maternity as a practice of quiet, mundane and daily transgressions. Mobilizing a decolonial and feminist theoretical framework that includes the works of Gloria Anzaldúa, Betty Ruth Lozano and Mimi Sheller which she puts in conversation with theoretical contributions from global Black Studies, affect theory and environmental humanities, she proposes the term “common mother” to link maternity to the double valance of the “commons” as a site of communal subsistence and governance, as well as the “common” as an ordinary subject, presumed natural and omnipresent. By examining transnational representations of maternity in contemporary Latin American film and fiction, she argues that a feminist commons emerges to reconstruct and reconfigure social relations at the margins of neoliberalism and the patriarchal state. Ultimately, she shows how the maternal subject propagates a common(s) that unsettles the colonial and modern boundaries of the human body, the domestic space and imagined futures.