Professor Andrés Zamora is Professor of Spanish, and current chair of the Spanish and Portuguese Department at Vanderbilt University. Professor Zamora’s research falls into five overlapping areas of interest: the poetics of the narrative genre in the Spanish nineteenth and twentieth-century novel; the rhetoric of ideological discourses in Spain from the eighteenth century to the present; the tropological use of the body, particularly through sex and scatology; the cultural trade between Spain and Latin America as a major element in the construction of their respective identities; and the trends, patterns and evolution of Spanish Cinema. He has published numerous articles on those topics and the books El doble silencio del eunuco. Poéticas sexuales de la novela realista según Clarín (1999) and Featuring Post-National Spain. Film Essays (2016). He is currently working in two book projects, one on Spanish ideological fictions and another on the hidden and neglected centrality of excrement in Spanish and Western culture. In 2001, he received the Jeffrey Nordhaus Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in the College of Arts and Sciences.