Nathan C. Henne
Assistant Professor of Spanish
and Latin American Literature 
Ph.D., University of California, 2007
M.A., San Diego State University,
2001
B.A., University of Texas,
1991
Nathan Henne, from the department of Quezaltenango in Guatemala, recently received his Ph.D. 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 “canonical” texts of Latin America (Miguel Angel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier) and the United States (William Faulkner).
Nathan’s teaching focuses on: literature of the Americas, Latin American magic realism, pre-Contact Indigenous literatures, translation theory, language theory, and Spanish language instruction. He has spent considerable time over the last several years doing field work in 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 emphasizing literary methodologies.