Freeman,Emma Catherine

Originally from the United Kingdom, Emma Freeman holds a PhD in Hispanic Literature from the University of Pittsburgh, USA (Andrew Mellon Fellow), and currently serves as Director of the Department of Humanistic Studies at Tecnológico de Monterrey, where she leads a team of more than 100 faculty members and 700 professional-level courses per year, taught in both English and Spanish. Her career combines institutional leadership, academic talent attraction and development, and the management of strategic relationships within and beyond the institution. As director, she has built and executed high-impact faculty strategies: she scaled the department's Tec Week course offering from 135 to more than 300 sections per semester, led the academic design team through the disciplinary competency approval process (EAAC), and has driven the adoption of Digital Humanities across the faculty including 100% training completion among tenured professors and her own certification in Digital Humanities for Department Directors. She has led recruitment and engagement processes for external expert faculty to strengthen the department's academic offering. Her capacity for institutional representation and alliance-building is reflected in her role as liaison between the School of Humanities and Education and the Monterrey International Book Fair since 2023 where she designs and coordinates an annual agenda of 25 to 40 events, from the call for proposals through execution with both external and internal teams as well as in her role on the organizing committee of the Congress of Women in the Humanities and the VII Digital Humanists Conference. She is a graduate of the Asia-Pacific Women in Leadership (APWIL) mentorship program of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities, focused on women's leadership in academia, and has twice been recognized by Tecnológico de Monterrey through the Circle of Distinguished Professors (2023, 2024) and the Graduating Students' Award (August 2026). With teaching and academic leadership experience across seven countries on four continents (the United Kingdom, the United States, Mexico, Venezuela, South Africa, China, and Thailand), her research focuses on Latin American narrative and theater, and her doctoral thesis was the first critical study of the work of Mexican playwright Felipe Santander.