Melanie Forehand holds a Ph.D. in Spanish from Vanderbilt University. Her dissertation research centers on parabolic representations of exile among the Spanish Civil War exiles living in Mexico.

She is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow for Digital and Public Humanities at Vanderbilt University. In collaboration with the Ateneo español de México, her current research project focuses on building the crowdsourced story map Exile3639.com to capture the stories of members of the Spanish Civil War exile community.

Prior to graduating, Melanie worked as the Program Assistant for the Center for Second Language Studies at Vanderbilt.

She was a Mellon fellow in Digital Humanities, a HASTAC scholar, an instructor for elementary and intermediate Spanish, and is a co-founder of the online digital teaching repository Language Panda.