Event Description
This is the fourth and last event this year in the series Novedades/Lançamentos: New Scholarship @ Berkeley. In this space, we highlight new work from Berkeley scholars about Latin America and the Caribbean by inviting a faculty member and a graduate student to discuss the recent work of a Berkeley faculty member.
Estelle Tarica’s latest work, Holocaust Consciousness and Cold War Violence in Latin America, examines how community leaders, writers, and political activists facing state repression in Latin America have drawn on and debated the validity of Holocaust terms to describe human rights atrocities in their own countries.
Speakers
Estelle Tarica is Professor of Latin American Literatures and Cultures in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese and a former Chair of the Latin American Studies Program at UC Berkeley. Her research includes the study of racial ideologies and how these are linked to discourses of cultural decolonization, especially in Mexico, the Andes, and the French Caribbean. Her work is particularly engaged with questions of novelistic form and language as a means to approach the dynamics of modern subjectivity in highly racialized societies.
Alejandra Decker is a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Languages and Literatures, focusing on the history of scientific thought in 19th century Latin American literature. Her research explores how writers and artists engaged with new technologies, scientific paradigms, and urban infrastructures in their work, and how these complicated or reified issues of race, gender, religion, and nationality. Alejandra is currently co-coordinator of the Latin American Art & Literature Working Group and co-editor of Lucero, the graduate student literary journal of the Department of Spanish & Portuguese.
Robert Kaufman is a professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Comparative Literature. His teaching and research emphasize several interrelated areas: 20th and 21st-century American poetry and its dialogues with modern Latin American, German, French, and British poetry; romantic and 19th-century poetry and poetics; philosophical aesthetics, literary theory, and the history of criticism (especially since Kant and romanticism); and Frankfurt School Critical Theory and the arts (poetry and the other literary genres; music; cinema; painting, etc.).