Dr. Ruth Z. Yuste-Alonso is an educator, translator and scholar with +10 years of teaching experience. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish at Hendrix College where she teaches courses on the Spanish language, Hispanic literatures, cultures, and cinemas. From fall 2021 to spring 2023, she also served as Murphy Fellow in Spanish at the Murphy Scholars Program, a mentoring program hosted by the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation where a selected cohort of Hendrix students have the opportunity to pursue advanced studies in literatures and languages.
She has earned a B.A. in Translation and Interpreting and an M.A. in Teaching Spanish Language and Culture from Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Spanish Studies from the University of Connecticut (UConn). She has also completed graduate certificates in College Instruction and Feminist Studies. During her stay at UConn, she served as a graduate instructor teaching courses on Spanish language, culture and film for the Department of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, and WGSS courses on gender and film courses for the Program of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
Her research interest focuses on feminist analysis of cultural artefacts within Hispanic cultures with a particular emphasis on contemporary Spanish cinema. In her dissertation titled
Cuestión de género(s): la mirada en el cine de Manuela Burló Moreno, Mar Coll y Leticia Dolera
[Gender/Genre Matters: The Gaze in the Cinema of Manuela Burló Moreno, Mar Coll, and Leticia Dolera], she problematizes the idea of the
female gaze
through the lens of film genres in the works of three contemporary Spanish women filmmakers to underline its conceptual limitations and, in turn, propose an intersectional, genre-informed approach to their works allowing for a richer understanding and discussion of Spanish women's cultural production.