Sandra Cypess

Sandra Messinger Cypess is Professor Emerita of Latin American Literature and has served as Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Maryland, whose faculty she joined in 1994 after having been at SUNY Binghamton University since 1976. Prof. Cypess received her B.A. at Brooklyn College, majoring in Spanish and French. Her MA was awarded from Cornell and her PhD from the University of Illinois. Her research deals primarily with women writers, the representation of Women in Latin American Literature, and Latin American theatre. Her theoretic focus centers on feminist theory and semiotics. Motivated by her doctoral work with Don Luis Leal at the University of Illinois, she has published extensively on writers from Mexico (Villaurrutia, Carballido, Garro, Castellanos, Berman). Her book, La Malinche in Mexican Literature: from History to Myth (U Texas Press 1991), was completed after being in Mexico under the auspices of an NEH summer fellowship, and is considered one of the major pieces of scholarship on that figure. Editor of three additional books on various topics, she is also co-editor with Mario Rojas of the Drama section of the Handbook of Latin American Studies. She was invited to write the chapter on Twentieth Century Latin American theatre for the Cambridge History of Latin American Literature. Prof. Cypess also appears in the documentary, "Indigenous Always: The Story of La Malinche and the Conquest of Mexico, an award-winning documentary that was broadcast on national television through PBS.