Sherry Velasco

Divisional Dean for the Humanities

Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Gender Studies

Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Gender Studies Sherry Velasco serves as divisional dean for the humanities. Her areas of specialization include Early Modern Spanish prose and theater and early modern women’s narrative. Other interests include gender studies, queer theory and visual cultural studies.

Velasco has held numerous leadership positions at USC. She served on USC Dornsife’s Diversity Council and Humanities Personnel Committee as well as the university’s Digital Humanities Program Executive Board and Curriculum Committee on Diversity, among many others.

She served several terms as chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese (now the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures) and of the Department of French and Italian. She has been recognized with USC’s General Education Teaching Award, the Advancing Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences Initiative and a Faculty Fellowship with the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute. Velasco joined USC Dornsife in 2006, and she will continue to hold her current appointments as professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Gender Studies Program.

She is the author of four books: Lesbians in Early Modern Spain (Vanderbilt, 2011); Male Delivery: Reproduction, Effeminacy, and Pregnant Men in Early Modern Spain (Vanderbilt, 2006); The Lieutenant Nun: Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire, and Catalina de Erauso (Texas, 2000); and Demons, Nausea and Resistance in the Autobiography of Isabel de Jesús (1611-1682) (New Mexico, 1996).