Ph.D. The Ohio State University; The Ohio State University

SH 741D (304) 696-2748

butler@marshall.edu

A native of Texas, she is an Assistant Professor of Spanish. Her expertise is Latin America literature and culture from the colonial period to the 1800s. Her secondary area is gender and women’s studies with a special interest in Chicano/a literature and culture. Her research interests are focused on travel literature regarding Peru in the 1800s. She successfully defended her doctoral dissertation, which involved literary and cultural analysis of travel texts written by imperialist writers -- both men and women -- and Peruvian writers regarding Peruvian culture during the early to mid 1800s. She has read papers about Latin American women writers at professional conferences on the West Coast and in the South, as well as two recent papers from her dissertation at West Virginia University (2000) and University of Kentucky (2001). 

Additionally, she is the faculty advisor for Marshall University's AIAEP (Asociación de Intercambio de Las Américas, España y Portugal -- formerly the Latino Club). She also has published original poetry in the following literary journals and anthology, Phantasmagoria (2002) ; The Awakenings Review (2002) ; and Wild Sweet Notes II, an anthology of poetry from West Virginia (2005)."

She has also published Travel Narratives in Dialogue: Contesting Representations of Nineteenth-Century Peru
published by Peter Lang; (2008) as part of their series Currents in Comparative Romance Languages and Literatures.

In 2000, she won a teaching award from The Ohio State University and adheres strictly to an open-door policy for all of her students