About

Rhonda Buchanan grew up in Essex, Maryland, where she studied Spanish at Kenwood High School and fell in love with the language and Hispanic culture. She went on to earn a B.A. in Spanish at Western Maryland College, and then an M.A. and Ph.D. in Spanish at the University of Colorado. She credits her wonderful Spanish professors for her long career as a Professor of Spanish at the University of Louisville, and is still in touch with her high school Spanish teacher. She joined the Department of Classical and Modern Languages at the University of Louisville in 1985 as a Spanish professor, and in 2002, was named Director of Latin American and Latino Studies, a program she helped to found and directed for twenty years. Her labrador retriever, Jake, has accompanied her during the last years at UofL, and has served as the official Latin American and Latino Studies Therapy Dog. Jake earned first place in the UofL Cutest Pet Contest in 2021.  

Buchanan is the rare recipient of all three University-wide Distinguished Professor awards, for Teaching, Service to the Community, and Outstanding Scholarship, Research, and Creative Activity. In 2004, she received the Trustees Award, UofL’s most prestigious faculty award, which is presented annually to one professor who has made an extraordinary impact on the lives of students. In the early years of her academic career, she published critical studies on contemporary Latin American authors, and became close friends with many of them and visited them in their homelands. After publishing numerous critical studies on these authors, they invited her to translate their works of fiction to English and she found a new passion as a translator, a craft that she continues to hone to this day. Thus far, she has published translations to English of works of fiction and essays written in Spanish by authors from Argentina, including Mempo Giardinelli, Tununa Mercado, Ana María Shua, and Perla Suez, and the Mexican author Alberto Ruy Sánchez. She is the recipient of a 2006 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for the translation of Ruy Sánchez’s novel The Secret Gardens of Mogador: Voices of the Earth (White Pine P, 2009). She retired in 2022 as a Professor Emerita of Spanish and now has more time to devote to her life-long goal: Mastering the Art of Translation (with a nod to Julia Child). She enjoys cooking, running with Jake, daily Yoga with Adriene and her dog Benji (on YouTube), and cocktail hours with her husband Bob, Professor of Chemistry at UofL, chef extraordinaire, and the first reader of her translations. For photos of the authors she translates, and her home team, check out the Photo Gallery.