Nathan Henne, Ph.D.
Degrees Earned:
- PhD in Comparative Literature
- University of California, Santa Barbara, 2007
MA, San Diego State University, 2001 - BA, University of Texas, 1991
Nathan Henne, from the department of Quezaltenango in Guatemala, recently received his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His dissertation, “A Poetics of the Uncertain: Trajectories of the Maya Mind and Tongue in American Literatures”, uses principles derived from K’iche’, a language spoken in the highlands of Guatemala, to problematize translations of the Popol Vuh into Spanish and English. Nathan seeks to invert the traditional hierarchies of academic study in the Americas by applying the meaning making networks of K’iche’ literatures to read the “canonical” texts of literary productions in Latin America and the United States.
Nathan’s teaching focuses on: Spanish language instruction, literature of the Americas, Latin American magic realism, pre-Contact Indigenous literatures, translation theory, and language theory. He has spent considerable time over the last several years doing field work in various villages across the Guatemalan altiplano in order to better understand and translate the archaic K’iche’ of the Popol Vuh, “the oldest book in the Americas”, while emphasizingliterary methodologies.