Dr. Kathleen Newman is an associate professor in Spanish & Portuguese at the University of Iowa. Her research and teaching focuses on Latin American, Chicano, and Spanish cinemas as well as on theoretical questions regarding the relation between fictional narrative and politics and the relation between cinema and globalization.

She is the author of La Violencia del Dicurso: Elestado Autoritario y la Novella Politica Argentina, and co-editor of World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives. Her current research project, Argentine Silent Film: Feminism, Democracy, and Modernity, is a study of the relation between silent film, early feminist movements and democratization in Argentina in the first three decades of the twentieth century, with close attention being paid to the constitution of a transnational cultural imaginary through both national cinema and imported fiction feature films.

At Iowa, she has taught courses on Chicano cinema, and Latinx documentary.