Overview
Anna-Paden Carson is a fifth-year PhD candidate in Romance Studies at Duke University specializing in Hispanic and Latin American Literatures and Cultures. Her research investigates how the natural world and its potentially destructive forces was perceived, interpreted, and represented in the early modern Viceroyalty of Peru. Her dissertation, Contested Landscapes: Nature, Knowledge, and Authority in Colonial Peru, traces shifting portrayals of the Andean environment from late sixteenth-century Spanish writings that cast Peru as a land of threats and potential degeneration, to eighteenth-century creole texts that reframe it as both life-giving and providential, even in the wake of disaster. By foregrounding nature as an active historical and literary force, her work reveals how environmental events shaped knowledge-making, political authority, and imperial identity in the Andes. She is also pursuing graduate certificates in Latin American and Caribbean Studies and in College Teaching to further develop her scholarly and pedagogical interests.
Carson graduated summa cum laude from Washington and Lee University in 2016 with a BA in Spanish and a minor in Poverty Studies. In pursuit of this degree, she published her capstone titled "Justice for Noncitizens: A Case for Reforming the Immigration Legal System" (2017) where she argued that the immigration legal system should be relocated to the judicial branch in order to best uphold the ideals set forth by the U.S. Constitution. She then served as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Tunja, Colombia and went on to cultivate her passion for teaching by completing Teach for America in Nashville, Tennessee and earning a MA in Teaching. Carson taught in secondary education for five years before returning to the classroom as a Davis Fellow for Peace in the Middlebury Spanish Language School and embarking on the pursuit of her doctorate the following fall.
