Tace Hedrick received her BA in English and Writing from the University of Colorado at Denver and her MA and PhD in Comparative Literature (20th-century Latin-American and French Literature and Contemporary Theory) from the University of Iowa. She currently offers courses in US Latino/a, Afro-Latina, and Chicanx cultural studies, as well as in feminist theory.

Dr. Hedrick’s book, Mestizo Modernisms: Race, Nation, and Identity in Latin American Culture, 1900–1940 (Rutgers Press, 2003) examines the necessarily intertwined discourses of mestizaje, sexuality, modernity, and nationalism in the work of several early 20th century Latin American modernist artists, including the Peruvian poet César Vallejo, Mexican artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral.

Her second book, Chica Lit: Popular Latina Fiction and Americanization in the Twenty-First Century, was published in 2015 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. In this book, Tace Hedrick discusses the vexed celebration of neoliberal narratives about Americanization, hard work, and individual success in popular women’s writing aimed at an audience of twenty- to thirty-something, upwardly mobile Latina readers. Professor Hedrick shows how chica lit’s market-driven representations function within the larger arena of struggles over popular representation of Latinas and Chicanas.

Currently Dr. Hedrick is writing her next book, tentatively titled Queering the Cosmic Race: Spirituality, Race, and Sexuality in Latino/American Cultural Work, 1970–2000. She excavates a transnational intellectual and artistic history of U.S. Latinos and Latin Americans where, from the early twentieth century, alternatives to Western spirituality such as teosofía, espiritismo, Buddhism, reincarnation, ancient indigenous beliefs, and New Age movements have been investigated as ways of reformulating ideas about the proper bodies for the nation.  These are artists whose mixed-race heritage and sometimes queer sexuality have lead them to seek within spiritual and esoteric traditions images of sexual and racial unity and a language of personal and social transformation.

Professor Hedrick has published articles on the Chicana lesbian writer Gloria Anzaldúa, queer Chilean poet Gabriel Mistral, and queer Puerto Rican New Age guru Walter Mercado, Peruvian poet César Vallejo, Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, as well as Latina chick lit. Her research ihas covered transnational US Latinx and Latin American intellectual history, queerness and New Age in Latino/American writers, and bilingual Chicana/o poetry and translation in journals such as Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies,CENTRO: Journal of Puerto Rican Studies, Journal of Cutlural History, The Translator, Latin American Literary Review, and The Luso-Brazilian Review, as well as in collections such as Footnotes: On Shoes and The Returning Gaze: Primitivism and Identity in Latin America.