Professor

Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Curriculum Vitae

Education

PhD, University of Texas at Austin, 2008

MA, University of Texas at Austin, 2004

BS, University of New Mexico, 2000

Biography

Anna M. Nogar is Professor of Hispanic Southwest Studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Her research specializations include Nuevomexicano writing and culture; colonial Mexican literature; Mexican American cultural and literary studies; and community oral history. She currently serves as the Associate Dean for Humanities and Interdisciplinary Units in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Nogar’s recent research focuses on the writing of early 20th-century bilingual New Mexican author and periodiquero Felipe M. Chacón. She co-authored the prizewinning scholarly edition and translation of his book of poetry, Poesía y prosa (1924) as El feliz ingenio neomexicano: Felipe M. Chacón and Poesía y Prosa (University of New Mexico 2021, paperback 2023). Nogar engages in literary recovery work as a member of the Board of Directors of the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project.

An expert on the 17th-century Spanish nun Sor María de Jesús de Ágreda, Dr. Nogar authored Quill and Cross in the Borderlands: Sor María de Ágreda and the Lady in Blue, 1628- the Present (University of Notre Dame 2018, paperback 2025), a cross-disciplinary study of nearly four hundred years of history, literature and folklore concerning the nun. Quill and Cross in the Borderlands was awarded the 2020 International Latino Book Award in the History and Religious Book categories. Nogar co-authored the prizewinning bilingual young reader’s book Sisters in Blue/Hermanas de azul (University of New Mexico 2017), which interprets Sor María de Ágreda’s travels for a youth audience.

Dr. Nogar’s expertise on colonial Mexican and Borderlands literatures is reflected a triptych of volumes that comprehensively examine Mexican literature. Nogar edited A History of Mexican Literature (Cambridge 2016, paperback 2019), named Outstanding Academic Title in 2017 by the American Library Association,A History of Mexican Poetry (Cambridge 2024) and A History of the Mexican Novel (Cambridge forthcoming). She also edited Colonial Itineraries of Contemporary Mexico: Literary and Cultural Inquiries (University of Arizona 2014).

She co-directs a community-centered oral history project that cultivates undergraduate and graduate humanities researchers across UNM who engage with local narrators to record life histories of nuevomexicanos of the Baby Boomer generation.

Dr. Nogar has published in a variety of journals including Confluencia, Honors in Practice, Journal of the Southwest, Latin American Literature Today, Renaissance Quarterly, Revista de estudios hispánicos, Chasqui, Church History, Early American Literature, New Mexico Historical Review, and Bulletin of Spanish Studies. Her articles have appeared in edited volumes internationally including Violencias y fronteras entre México y Estados Unidos; Los oficios del nómada: Fabio Morábito ante la crítica; The Worlds of Junípero Serra;and Asaltos a la historia: Reimaginando la ficción histórica en Hispanoamérica.

At UNM, Dr. Nogar is a faculty associate of the Southwest Hispanic Research Institute, the Latin American and Iberian Institute, and Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies. She serves in an elected capacity for the Modern Languages Association, and engages with community through public talks, book readings, podcasts, and radio interviews.

Research Interests

• New Mexican literature and culture: colonial, 19th-century, contemporary
• Colonial Mexican literature and cultural studies: women, marginalized authors, communities of reading, religious writing
• Mexican American literature and cultural studies
• Archival research: colonial, transatlantic and transpacific, 19th-century and contemporary archives
• Oral history methods and applicationss