Dr. Muñoz (Fitch until 2010) received a Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1989.  She is the Director of the Global Health Studies Program and a Professor of Spanish & Portuguese and Communication Studies at the University of Iowa.

Her ethnographic work began in Colombia with a Fulbright Dissertation grant in 1987.  Her ongoing research has included a project through the University of Iowa’s Digital Humanities Studio designed to bring scholarship about Colombian culture into public digital spaces: https://medellin.lib.uiowa.edu. During a second Fulbright project in 2022 Professor Muñoz collaborated with researchers from the Universidad de Antioquia in Medellín to examine peace education efforts in Colombian schools stemming from the Havana Peace Accords in 2016.

A 2022 recipient of a prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant, Dr. Muñoz is also involved in a three-year project titled, “Salud, to your Health!  Resources for Teaching Health Narratives in English and Spanish.” The project will create a digital database of resources for narrative medicine and health humanities for undergraduates and health professionals in the U.S., and community-based workshops which will foster the use of storytelling as a way to cope with health, illness, grief, and caregiving.

At U Iowa, Dr. Muñoz has taught courses on culture, language and health, and Spanish health narratives.