Kaitlin E. Thomas

“You'll spend a significant amount of time chipping away at a research project, and so, in order to avoid the 'bubble gum chewed too long' effect or any sense of arduousness that people sometimes speak about when talking about research, it should be something that, even when you don't have to, you would still 'hang with.'”

Kaitlin E. Thomas is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Norwich University. Her research delves into U.S. and Latina/o/e identities that are resulting from trans-border cultural and national fusion, (un)documented Latina/o/e immigration and contemporary border regions around the Spanish-speaking world. She is interested in intersections between social media and cultural iconography as well as exploring music as a site for resistance in Latin America and Spain.

Thomas has also completed non-degree studies with the Council of International Education Exchange in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Sevilla, Spain: the Centro Panoamericano de Idiomas in Guanacaste, Costa Rica; the Universidad Antonio de Nebrija in Madrid, Spain, and the Universidad Centroamericana “José Simeón Cañas” in La Libertad, El Salvador.

At Norwich, she teaches the courses Spanish I and II, Intermediate Spanish I and II, Advanced Spanish I and II, Hispanic Literature, the special topics classes U.S. Latinas/os and the Border, Music and Politics in Latin America, Contemporary Cuba, and La Hashtag nation.  Dr. Thomas is the founding organizer and chapter advisor of the Sigma Delta Pi Spanish Honors Fraternity. She was named a faculty fellow for the Center for Global Resilience and Security in 2020. Her academic research, journalism, and op-ed writing has appeared in the Delaware Review of Latin American Studies, Global Learning, The Baltimore Sun, Ethnomusicology Review, and Public Radio International, among other outlets.

Ph.D. Hispanic Studies, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom
M.A. Latin American & Spanish Language & Literature, NYU
B.A. Hispanic Studies, Washington College 
B.A. Music, Washington College

Kaitlin Thomas conducts research in 20th/21st century Hispanic cultural studies with an emphasis on borders, migration, performance, social media, and transcultural identity. The issues that most interest her as a scholar are the re-casted, re-negotiated, and emergent U.S. and Hispanic perspectives resulting from trans-border cultural and national fusion, (un)documented immigration to the U.S., the evolution and impact of domestic and international policies, and how these manifest within cultural spheres. 

Her research journey took a more circuitous route than many of her peers. After high school, she attended a small college on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, taking multiple language classes every semester and looking for internships out in the community where she could use Spanish. One of those internships wound up with the local public school system, where she worked as a bilingual liaison, migrant educator, school interventionist, interpreter, and more for several years after graduating. After a few years, graduate school took her to Madrid, Spain and then returned to the States to begin teaching at the university level while resuming some of the bilingual community liaison work before moving into a Ph.D. program and eventually to Norwich. 

Thomas actively mentors students, advising them to figure out what the question, issue, or subject is that gets you fired up and/or that you spend your free time looking in to, and pursue it as a research topic. She collaborates with colleagues at Norwich and beyond, including a team of researchers at UVM that is working on a five-year project titled, “Social Media Sentiment and Forced Migration Narratives."

HN 101 Immigration Nation
SP 121 Beginning Spanish I
SP 122 Beginning Spanish II
SP 205 Intermediate Spanish I 
SP 206 Intermediate Spanish II
SP 301 Advanced Spanish Conversation
SP 302 Advanced Spanish Composition
SP 350 Immigration & Hispanics
SP 350 Music and Politics in Latin America
SP 415 Border Narratives
SP 421 Spanish Reading and Research 

“El Peso Hero: Comic Book Protagonists of the (Un)Documented Experience”. Latinx Comics Studies: Critical and Creative Crossings, eds. Maite Urcaregui and Maria Fernanda Diaz-Basteris. Accepted and forthcoming April 2025.

“Pepe versus Kermit: A Memetic Battleground about Latino/a-centric Immigration and Policy”. Popular Culture Review, vol. 34, no. 1, spring 2023.

“Using Memes to Carve a Space for Undocumented Latino/a Visibility and to Tackle Fossilized Myths”. Latin American and LatinX Visual Culture, vol. 3, 4, 2021, pp. 12-34.