Dr. Szeghi earned her B.A. from the University of Cincinnati, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Arizona. One focal point of her scholarship is culturally specific views of appropriate land use and just land ownership in American Indian, Latina/o, and Euroamerican literatures. Dr. Szeghi approaches this topic, along with the use of literature as social protest in contact zones, by placing writers of different cultural backgrounds into conversation with one another. With her current research project Dr. Szeghi is building upon this previous work by addressing the ways in which indigenous peoples throughout the Americas use literature as a means of advocating for their human rights and articulating a conception of human rights that conflicts in critical ways with those contained in Western human rights discourse. Dr. Szeghi's current project is funded by both a Peter McGrath Human Rights Fellowship and the University of Dayton's Global Education Program (which focuses on South America during the 2012-2013 academic year).