Stephanie Kirk earned her Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese from New York University. Her main teaching and research interests include the literature and culture of colonial Latin America and the early modern Atlantic world, with a focus on gender studies and religion. Her book, Convent Life in Colonial Mexico: A Tale of Two Communities was published by Florida UP in 2007. Professor Kirk is currently at work on her second monograph, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Gender Politics of Culture in Colonial Mexico (under contract with Ashgate Publishing), which examines Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s engagement with masculine institutional and ecclesiastical power in her explorations of the cultural and intellectual spheres of Mexico and the wider Iberian Atlantic world. Reading through the lens of Sor Juana’s life and work, the book analyzes the importance of the library, the printing press, the anatomy theater, Latinate culture, and spirituality to cultural life in seventeenth-century Mexico. Professor Kirk has published numerous articles and essays and is the editor of Estudios coloniales en el siglo XXI: Nuevos itinerarios, to be published in 2011 by the Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana at the University of Pittsburgh. The collection, which features the work of leading scholars in colonial Latin American studies, is dedicated to exploring new issues and approaches in the field in light of recent theoretical debates and new interdisciplinary methodologies.