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My research and teaching interests focus on Andean literatures and cultures, cultural history, youth cultures, counterculture, music, and information systems, with a comparative approach to other Latin American and global social formations. As a scholar and teacher, I explore the racial, ethnic, gender, and economic dimensions of cultural production and advocate for diversity and inclusion in my students' learning process, on campus, and in the greater community. I received a B.A. in literature at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and an M.A. in Spanish at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. During the past decade, I have taught all levels of the Spanish curriculum, from language to advanced culture courses.
In my dissertation, 'Los enterradores de gatos: Juventud y contracultura en los long sixties andinos,' I take an interdisciplinary approach to studying poetry, music, print culture objects, and politics. Focusing on a period of intense historical change—mass migration, urbanization, and revolution—I aim to highlight the understudied role of youth cultural production in fostering social change and confronting long-standing historical oppression in the region. Each chapter focuses on a youth cultural producer: the writer-guerrilla fighter, the neo-avant-garde poet, the rocker, and the psychedelic artist. Each of these figures articulates global, regional, and national youth cultures in a specific way and, as such, represents a unique response to the turbulent period. After completing my dissertation, I plan to expand my research on youth cultures to other regions in the Americas.
While studying at Washington University, I developed a strong interest in information systems, particularly how to guarantee equitable access to global knowledge and culture for people in the Global South and social and linguistic minorities worldwide. I had the opportunity to delve into this subject when I worked as an Intern Subject Librarian in the Romance Languages and Literatures section of Washington University Libraries. Designing new paths to promote the libraries' collection worldwide, reviewing digital and physical catalogs, and planning book acquisitions inspired me to continue pursuing and deepening my knowledge of information equity and justice. This interest dovetails with my commitment to diversity and inclusion in all academic settings.
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I’m a PhD candidate in Hispanic Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. I have a solid background in both Latin American and Iberian Studies with strong training in SLA pedagogies. During the last ten years, I have taught a broad range of courses on Spanish as a second language and Hispanic Cultures in both online and face-to-face settings at different higher education institutions in Europe and the US.
My dissertation is titled Narratives in Transit: Identity Mutations and Digital Experimentations in the Transatlantic Literary Field (1996-2022) and engages with some of the questions that are redefining and expanding the Hispanic cultural and artistic field: How can a narrative be constructed through different analog and digital media? How are the changes in cultural production and circulation in the digital age affecting the concepts of authorship, originality, and public intellectual figure? An even more important question: what can digital narratives tell about new diverse identities and its struggling in this neoliberal age? Through the metaphor of “narratives in transit”, I address most of these ideological and aesthetic transformations that today join technology and border crossing to craft and embrace a new contemporary language. Hence, I make special emphasis on the ways transmedia storytelling, digital sampling, and speculative fiction are reshaping memory and identity discourses while deconstructing cultural traditions and the literary canon in the Transatlantic Hispanophone world.
So far in my academic career, I have developed a solid and coherent research agenda that has created an organic and fluid relationship with the topics and corpora studied in my dissertation. Among other works, in my book chapter: “Pantallas de papel: remediación y transmemoria en Crónica de viaje de Jorge Carrión”, I focus on the role of digital aesthetics and displacement as mediators that articulate new discursivities of representing memory and other national identities within the Spanish state today for a generation that grew up during the Democratic Transition. Accordingly, I found several lines of convergence between Spain and the Southern Cone in my article “Desacralizing the Space of the Narrateable: (Post)Memory, Autofiction and Publishing Market in 76 and Los Topos by Félix Bruzzone”, where I examine how the generation of the grandchildren of the disappeared by the Argentinean dictatorship is transforming the trends of the book market to create new ways of narrating memory and trauma, such as speculative and weird fiction. Accordingly, I have been carefully studying the great
emergence of science fiction in Spanish. Hence, I have collaborated on the project Historia de la ciencia ficción latinoamericana (Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2021) with a chapter on Bolivian science fiction where I argue that speculative fiction played a key role in the recovery of fantasy indigenous oral in order to reimagine new plausible futures where indigenous communities are emancipated and empowered. In 2022, I also co-edited the volume Recalibrando los circuitos de la máquina. Ciencia ficción e imaginarios tecnológicos en las narrativa en español del siglo XXI (Albatros, serie Palabras de América).
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Juan Manuel Ramírez Velázquez is a Ph.D. Candidate in Hispanic Studies with a graduate certificate in Latin American Studies and a Teaching Citation at Washington University in St. Louis (WashU). In addition, he is a 2022-2023 Graduate Fellow for the WashU Center for the Humanities. His areas of interest include sixteenth and seventeenth-century colonial discourse and cultural studies in the Iberian Atlantic World. In his dissertation, “Transgressive Mobilities: Women, Gender, and Affective Political Economies in the Ibero-Atlantic World, 1521-1650,” Juan Manuel studies the intersections of gender, race, and mobility in early modern and colonial Latin American legal documents through literary performance and affect theory. His dissertation project builds on the analysis of early modern judicial documents, such as proof of merits, testaments, and licenses, along with the intellectual history produced by early modern women writers. These topics are also explored in his forthcoming articles, “Sowing Wheat and Other Merits: The First Black ‘Conquistador’ of the Mexican Field” (forthcoming from Hispanic Review) and “Maternal Landscapes: An Answer to the Problem of Women’s Education in Colonial Mexico” (forthcoming from the Bulletin of Spanish Studies). Additionally, an excerpt of Juan Manuel’s dissertation has been recently abstract accepted by the Journal of Early Modern Studies for a special issue on subaltern writing and popular memory in the early modern world. Juan Manuel’s research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, Washington University’s Department of Romance Languages and Literature, and the Latin American Studies Program. He has been the Graduate Student Coordinator of Sigma Delta Pi at WashU (2017-2020), has served as the Editorial Assistant for the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos during 2019-2020, and has been involved in a variety of departmental and university committees and initiatives.
Juan Manuel has eight years of teaching experience in US higher education institutions. He has taught language, cultures, and literatures courses and programs in both online and face-to-face settings. His teaching is directly connected to his research through the collective exploration and interpretation of silenced voices in published and unpublished literatures. His pedagogy has been praised by colleagues and professors, for which he has been awarded two teaching prizes. He was also selected by the WashU Center for Teaching and Learning to attend and complete the Teaching Summer Residency with the National Center for the Humanities in July 2022. His passion for teaching goes beyond the traditional academic scope as can be seen in his work as a Graduate Fellow for the WashU College Prep Program (2017-2022) and as a tutor for the Prison Education Project (2020). Juan Manuel is incredibly thankful for the opportunity to serve and work with underrepresented and marginalized peoples, as his understanding of social and educational justice has greatly expanded from this experience.
Santiago Rozo Sánchez
My main areas of research and teaching include contemporary Latin American Cultural Production with an emphasis on Colombia and Mexico, Cultural Theory and Literary Criticism, Film Studies, and Urban Humanities. My teaching practice is directly informed by my research, I invite students to challenge conventional notions in culture, politics, and identity, with specific attention to the changes that constantly redefine our experience as global citizens and cultural agents. I strongly believe in the emancipatory potential of pedagogy, in the sense that the exposure to knowledge is always an act of discovery that modifies our conception of the world and our own role in society. My research understands that interdisciplinarity is at the core of any humanistic endeavor and, in addition to an added complexity and broader perspective, its most meaningful contribution is showing us that academic work is not an individual enterprise, but a collective struggle.
The ability of literature, film, and other cultural products to defamiliarize common sense and stimulate thought continues to inspire my academic interest. I think that our shared understanding of cultural devices and the mediation they produce can lead to new commons and other communal forms. From there, we can build collective reading practices that shed light on literature’s ability to perform social scaffolding and point towards unfathomed possibilities of what human could mean. My dissertation “The Work of the Colombian Novel: National Popular Realism, Literary Field, and Political Forms (1967-2020)” is rooted in this understanding and is driven by the following questions: Why read novels today? What can literature do after it loses its social function? What are the politics of literature? The broad aim of the project is to build an infrastructure of the contemporary Colombian novel through its form(s), while laying its foundations through the relations between literary form, literary field, and politics of literature in the given historical-geographical material conditions of Colombia.