A native of Raleigh, North Carolina, Dr. Natalie Love joins the ETFL department this year as Assistant Professor of Spanish. She holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree from UNC Charlotte and a doctorate in Spanish from UNC Chapel Hill. When not immersed in teaching and scholarship, Dr. Love enjoys hiking, cooking, listening to a wide variety of music, and watching works of mystery suspense.

Dr. Love’s fascination with Spanish literature began during her undergraduate studies, namely in “a course on women writers from Spain, in which [she] studied several works from the author María de Zayas.” This course, among others—including Dr. Maryrica Lottman’s on honor in Golden Age literature and Dr. José Manuel Batista’s on Afro-Cuban literature and culture— paved the way for her own research into “gender roles and relations, as well as power dynamics between the sexes in Hispanic literature.” Her later study of Uruguayan author Horacio Quiroga, under advisor Dr. Juan Carlos González Espitia, sparked her ongoing “fascination with the connections between shifting gender roles and illness in literary works from [the] late Nineteenth Century in the Hispanic world.”

Given her fond memories of her own undergraduate experience, it seems only fitting that Dr. Love is most excited by the opportunities our campus will afford her in getting to know her students and establishing a “good rapport.” Through such relationships, she hopes to highlight the ongoing relevance of literary study. In fact, she wishes people outside of her field “understood that literature is a very relevant subject that can help to reveal much about a society at a given point in time, and that it can also help to illuminate present day issues such as gender, sexuality, race, and socioeconomic inequalities.”

When asked what she’s found most helpful as she settles into a new routine here at UNCP, Dr. Love answers that her “colleagues have been very kind [and] welcoming.” We look forward to working alongside her in the coming years.