Yesenia Blanco holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley. She joined the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics as a Lecturer in Spanish in Fall 2025. Prior to her academic position at the University of Oklahoma, Yesenia taught Spanish as a second/another language, Spanish as a heritage language, and Iberian, Latin American, and Latinx literatures and cultures at the University of California, Berkeley for a decade. During her time at Berkeley, she was awarded a Berkeley
Language Center (BLC) Fellowship, for which she completed a research project on curriculum development for courses on Spanish as a heritage language.
Yesenia’s research agenda includes embodied solidarities and affective atmospheres in literary and cultural texts from 1930s Iberia. In addition to Iberian Studies, Yesenia’s research interests include teaching Spanish as a heritage language and critical pedagogies in the language classroom.
At OU, Yesenia teaches beginning, intermediate, and advanced Spanish-language courses.
