Dr. Rebecca Janzen, an assistant professor of Spanish at Bluffton University, will present a program Tuesday, Oct. 27, on her newly published book, “The National Body in Mexican Literature: Collective Challenges to Biopolitical Control.”

Beginning with a reception at 3:45 p.m., the event is free and open to the public in Bluffton’s Musselman Library Reading Room.

The book, Janzen’s first, “is a major contribution to the study of Mexican literature, and undoubtedly one of the most important books on Mexican cultural studies to emerge in recent years,” says one reviewer, Pedro Palou, a faculty member in Latin American literature and studies at Tufts University. It shows, he says, “how the Mexican state uses the body (illnesses, disabilities or marginal experiences of the body) to convey a vision of the ‘national body.’”

Through historical reflections and literary analyses, Janzen explores how characters in Mexican literature “represent, confront, contest and become subject to the post-revolutionary state’s biopolitical power,” adds another reviewer, Brian Price from Brigham Young University.

Janzen is Bluffton’s 2015-16 C. Henry Smith Scholar. She holds master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Toronto.