Mattlyn Cordova

Postdoctoral Fellow of the Institute for Latino Studies

Mattlyn Cordova received her PhD in American Studies from Harvard University in 2026. Her research topics span film studies, digital studies, Latinx visual culture, affect theory, and brownness. More specifically, she is interested in understanding the role of digital technology in our understandings of racial and ethnic formations in the United States. As a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow, she will work on her first book manuscript, which explores the relationship between formations of Latinidad and digital spectatorship. It considers how digital distribution has enabled new forms of viewing, in turn developing new modes of spectatorship that enable the creation of communities from dispersed spectators. Her work examines how the Latinx cultural imaginary, or Latinidad, is created through dispersed, imagined communities, focusing on the affective relationships that develop between spectators and televisual media.