Ashley Kerr is an associate professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies. As an undergraduate, Kerr spent a year living in Valparaíso, Chile. After graduation she taught English in Argentine Patagonia as a Fulbright English teaching assistant. She has also taught abroad in Valencia, Spain; Montevideo, Uruguay; and sailed around the Atlantic as a faculty member on Semester at Sea. At the University of Idaho, she teaches upper-level courses on Latin American culture, literature and film. Her research focuses on race and gender in Argentina and Uruguay in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Her first book, Sex, Skulls, and Citizens: Gender and Racial Science in Argentina (1860-1910), was named the 2020 Best Book by the Nineteenth Century Studies section of the Latin American Studies Association. She is currently working on a book looking at how the Buenos Aires zoo and its animals were used to shape society at the turn of the century.

• Southern Cone literature
• 19^th century studies
• History of science
• Latin American studies
• Animal Studies

Books

• Sex, Skulls, and Citizens: Gender and Racial Science in Argentina (1860-1910), Vanderbilt University Press, March 2020.

Peer-Reviewed Articles

• “Trust Me, I’m a Doctor: Explorer-Anthropologists, Medicine, and Colonialism in Argentina, 1863-1881.” Latin American Literary Review, 47.93 (2020): 2-11.  
• “Progress at What Price?: Defenses of Indigenous Peoples in Argentine Writing about Patagonia (1894-1904), Decimonónica 16.2 (Summer 2019): 17-33.
• “Indigenous Lovers and Villainous Scientists: Rewriting Nineteenth-Century Ideas of Race in Argentine Romance Novels,” Chasqui 48.1 (May 2019): 293-310.
• “From Savagery to Sovereignty: Identity, Politics, and International Exhibitions of Argentine Anthropology, 1878-1892,” Isis 108.1 (2017): 62-81.
• “The Sound of Silence: Representing the Other in Sylvia Iparraguirre’s La tierra del fuego,” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 36.3 (2012): 519-540.

Book Chapters

• “Becoming a Woman, Becoming Chile: Motherhood and the Self-Fashioning Subject in La chica del trombón.” La narrativa de Antonio Skármeta. Ed. César Ferreira and Jason Jolley. Lima: Universidad Ricardo Palma, 2017. 141-155.

• Outstanding Faculty Award, Student Achievement Awards (2020)

• Alumni Awards for Excellence: Inspirational Mentor (2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022)

• Sex, Skulls, and Citizens won the Best Book of 2020 Award given by the Nineteenth-Century Studies Section of the Latin American Studies Association.

• Sex, Skulls, and Citizens was named a finalist for the 2021 PROSE Awards, awarded by the Association of American Publishers.