Estelle Tarica

Estelle Tarica (PhD Comparative Literature, Cornell, 2000) is Professor of Latin American Literatures and Cultures in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and a former Chair of the Latin American Studies Program at UC Berkeley. She is the author of The Inner Life of Mestizo Nationalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), concerning the discourse of indigenismo and mestizaje in Mexico, Peru and Bolivia and focusing on the work of José María Arguedas, Rosario Castellanos and Jesús Lara. Her current book manuscript examines the circulation and reception of Holocaust testimony in Latin America during the Cold War. Her research areas include 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. She served as the co-founder and co-director, with Ivonne del Valle, of the Berkeley research group “Mexico and the Rule of Law” (events). Her articles have appeared in edited volumes and in the journals Chasqui, Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, Latin American Literary Review, Journal of Latin American Studies, Política Común and Yale French Studies, among others.