Sharonah Esther Fredrick
Instructor of Spanish
Sharonah’s degrees reflect her interest in the Age of Empire in Latin America and Spain (1492-1800), the teaching of Spanish and English as second languages, and indigenous health and cosmovisions throughout the Americas. Her PhD is from SUNY at Stony Brook, in Hispanic and Latin American Literature, with a concentration in colonial Mayan and Andean cosmology and literary rebellion; her MA is from Tel Aviv University, in the Renaissance History of the Americas and Mediterranean, with a specialization in Mesoamerican and Peruvian colonial theater and Judeo-Spanish writing of the Early Modern Period. Sharonah’s BA, from SUNY Buffalo, focused on Latin American Anthropology, with a minor in Celtic literature and Hebrew language. She has done post-doctoral research (2018) in piracy as cultural resistance in the Americas at UF at Gainesville, including the role of Judeo-Spanish refugees in buccaneering; earlier, she received a scholarship from Dublin’s Trinity college for summer research in Irish archaeology and Renaissance history. Sharonah has a TEFL Teaching Degree from the International Teacher Training Institute at Guadalajara, Mexico, with a specialization in English and Spanish Language Teaching Pedagogies and the Communicative Method in Linguistics. She has been published in University of Toronto’s Renaissance and Reformation (2021) regarding health and medicine in the colonial Americas and in Mayan and Andean communities, in the ASMAR series (2017 and 2021) on medieval and Renaissance culture, regarding the Judeo-Spanish Lilith legend and the Mayan Xtabay story, and images of supernatural females in Mayan and Judeo-Spanish literature; and in the International Ibero-American Institute of Georgetown University (Collection-2011) on Andean indigenous culture and colonial theater. In addition, Sharonah has written a full-length play, in Spanish, on piracy in colonial Puerto Rico for The Julia de Burgos Center for Hispanic Culture, performed in 2007; she has published on Mayan cosmology in The Yearly Humanities Review of Monterrey Tech University (2003), and in The Copan Institute of Mayan Archeology (2004). Apart from the academic world Sharonah has freelanced as cultural counselor with Berlitz Global Leadership Training for over eighteen years, working with many health-based companies including Novartis, Bayer, Teva, and in cultural competence operations throughout Latin America, Spain, the Middle East and the USA. She is delighted to join the Dept. of Hispanic Studies at the College of Charleston, where she will be teaching Spanish at all levels, as well as helping to develop collaborative programs in Spanish and the Health fields.
Education
Post-Doctoral Research: University of Florida (UF) at Gainesville (Piracy in the Caribbean and Pacific, 16th-19th centuries)
PhD: State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook (Hispanic Languages & Literatures)
TEFL certificate: International Institute of Teacher Training (ITTO), Guadalajara, Mexico (Teaching English as a Foreign Language)
MA: Tel Aviv University, Israel (Medieval and Early Modern History, Latin America and Spain)
BA: State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo (Anthropology and Foreign Languages)
Research Interests
Latin American and Indigenous History from pre-Contact, Conquest, and Independence periods; Mayan Archaeology; Peruvian Pre-Incan Archaeology; Judeo-Spanish literature in Spain and the New World; History of Medicine in indigenous Latin America and Medieval Spain; piracy as cultural resistance in Brazil, the Caribbean and the Pacific; Native American Southwestern History and Archaeology; and Comparative Studies on Empire in England, Ireland, Spain, Portugal and the Americas, from 1492-1830.
Courses Taught
SPAN 190, SPAN 313, SPAN 316
Honors and Awards
2019: Renaissance Society of America: Diversity Award for proposal: Colonial Cities and the Seasons: Disease and Geography; March 2019 Toronto RSA Conference
2019: SUNY at Buffalo, Gender Institute-Faculty Research Award: Research grant travel to Peru and Caribbean to investigate the presence of women in pirate communities of the 16th-18th centuries; portrayals of femininity and military strength in buccaneering expeditions http://www.buffalo.edu/genderin/opportunities.html
2018: University of Florida, Latin American and Caribbean Collection/Judaica Collection/George Smathers Libraries: Winner of post-doctoral scholarship on the presence of Sephardic Jews, Conversos and refugees in pirate communities of the Early Modern Caribbean and Pacific Latin America http://cms.uflib.ufl.edu/Portals/Judaica/Jews-in-Americas-web.pdf
2018: SUNY at Buffalo, Experiential Learning Network-Course Infusion Funds for Medical Spanish Course: Grant to give students the chance to learn early medical book-making techniques, for indigenous and colonial-era medicine, in Central America (Mayan region)
2018: SUNY at Buffalo, Experiential Learning Network-Costa Rica Incubator: Research grant travel to Costa Rica/Ecology, Indigenous Communities, and Education in Central America
2017-2018: Pueblo Grande Museum of Southwestern Native Archaeology, Phoenix/Connections Between Hopi and Aztec Culture: Researcher and author of materials depicting Southwestern-Central American parallels during the Colonial Period (1500-1799)
2017-2019: Michigan State University (MSU): Legacies of the Enlightenment: The Impact of the Natural World in 18th Century History. Contributor on New World indigenous and late colonial (Spanish, English and Portuguese) material pertinent to climate change and resources as reflected in literature.
2017: School for International Language and Culture, ASU and South Korean Ministry of Culture, under supervision of Professor Sookja Cho: Researcher on Pacific Spanish and Portuguese Colonial Writings on Japan and Korea, Translator of 16th-17th century Jesuit documents in Portuguese, Spanish and English
2016-17: Institute of Humanities Research, ASU-School of Transborder Studies: Colonial and Indigenous Cartography-Mapping Historical Erasure in the Southwest. Creator and designer of NativeAmerican/Spanish colonial historical material. See: http://michaelsimeone.org/omeka/credits
2015: Arizona Humanities Council: The Impact of Game of Thrones: Mapping the Historical Landscape of the Imagination. Creator and designer of grant proposal.
Publications
- Book: Killing the Deities: Resistance in Mayans and Andean Colonial Epics-A Comparative Study of the Popul Vuh and the Huarochiri Manuscript. University of Nebraska Press. Projected Date of Publication: (forthcoming) March 2024.
- “Mayan and Andean Medicine and Urban Space in the Colonial Spanish Americas,” in Renaissance & Reformation & Journal of U Toronto, 44.2, December 2021.
- Book Chapter: “Legend of the Xtabay-Mayan Feminine Cosmology and Spanish Literary Expression,” in BREPOLS series 2015 Commemorative Acts of Medieval and Renaissance Studies-Marginalized Groups November 2021.
- “Native American Shamanism in the Colonial Americas,” in (REWR) Routledge Encyclopedia of the World Renaissance, (forthcoming) April 2023.
- “Piracy as Resistance in Early Modern Caribbean and Pacific,” in (REWR) Routledge Encyclopedia of the World Renaissance, (forthcoming) April 2023.
- “Evolving Images in Jewish Latin American Cinema”, in Spanish and Latin American Cinema, vol. 16.3 November 2019.
- “Jorge Terukina Yamauchi’s Analysis of El imperio de la virtud de Bernardo Balbuena y el discurso barroco novohispano,” book review in Renaissance Quarterly (RQ) 71.3, Oct-Dec 2018.
- “La Celestina y el colapso del mundo judío de Sefarad: albores ominosos del supuesto Renacimiento,” in Revista Raices, ed. XXXII, nu. 116, Madrid, Fall 2018.
- “Deconstructing Lilith: Sephardic Judaic narratives of Lilith in Spain and the Americas,” in BREPOLS- 2012 Commemorative Acts of Medieval and Renaissance Studies-Eroticism, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1484/M.ASMAR-EB.5.111056
- “El Wanka y la Mirada de Cornejo Polar-Venganza Oral de lo Escrito.” (Quechua-language drama and Cornejo Polar’s Gaze-Spoken Revenge of the Written Word) in Europe/America: Circulación y Transferencias Culturales. Academia Nacional de la Historia Argentina & CONICET, 2016. http://europamerica.com.ar/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/EuropAmerica_circulacion-y-transferencias-culturales.pdf