Bethsabé Huamán Andía, the Sister Mona Riley Endowed Professor in the Humanities at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minnesota, has received the 2025 Premio Iberoamericano Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association for her book, Hijas del horror: Rocío Silva Santisteban y Regina José Galindo (Hipatia Ediciones, 2023). The monograph examines the representation of sexual violence during the civil wars in Guatemala and Peru depicted in the poetry of Rocío Silva Santisteban and the performance art of Regina José Galindo.
At St. Catherine University, a women’s undergraduate and co-ed graduate institution, Dr. Huamán Andía teaches in the department of literature, language, and writing, as well as the women’s studies program. Her extensive scholarship on poetry seeks to understand how to represent violence without reinforcing it.
“Representation is important, and especially representing [gendered] violence is important because most of the time, [agents] just reproduce the same idea that women are the one to blame, and there is not really a space where women can express their traumatic experience of the sexual abuse,” said Dr. Huamán Andía. “I think these pieces of art are trying to create a space of enunciation, a space in which women can say and narrate this experience from their own perspective.”
Originally from Lima, Peru, Dr. Huamán Andía holds degrees from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos and El Colegio de Mexico. She earned a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from New York University and a Ph.D. in literature from Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana.