Ignacio Sánchez Prado

Professor of Spanish, Latin American Studies, and Film and Media Studies
Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Latin American Studies program

Jarvis Thurston and Mona Van Duyn Professor in the Humanities
PhD, University of Pittsburgh
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    Prof. Sánchez Prado's areas of research include Mexican literary, film and cultural studies; Latin American intellectual history, neoliberal culture, food cultural studies and “world literature” theory.

    He is the author of seven books, including Naciones intelectuales. Las fundaciones de la modernidad literaria mexicana (1917-1959) (2009. Winner of the LASA Mexico 2010 Book Award), Screening Neoliberalism. Mexican Cinema 1988-2012 (2014), Strategic Occidentalism. On Mexican Fiction, The Neoliberal Book Market and the Question of World Literature (2018), and Intermitencias alfonsinas. Estudios y otros textos (2019).

    He is currently working on a study entitled Popular Cosmopolitanism, on genre and the idea of world culture as a social practice in mid-century Mexico. He is also working on the short book Taco for the Object Lessons series at Bloomsbury.

    Prof. Sánchez Prado has edited several book collections, including Mexican Literature in Theory (2018) and Mexican Literature as World Literature (2021). Prof. Sánchez Prado is editor of the series Critical Mexica Studies in Vanderbilt University Press and co-editor, with Leslie Marsh, of the SUNY Press Series on Latin American Cinema. He is a co-editor of A History of Mexican Literature and forthcoming histories of Mexican poetry and the Mexican novel for Cambridge University Press.

    Prof. Sánchez Prado’s scholarly articles have appeared in a diversity of books and journals academic books and journals. His most recent essays include a study Mexican film adaptations of world literature featuring the comic Cantinflas, published by Journal of World Literature, a study of the Mexican historian and thinker Edmundo O’Gorman and a Latin Americanist critique of John Guillory’s Cultural Capital. Beyond the academy, he has been a contributor to media outlets in Mexico and the United States, including the Washington Post, Al Jazeera, the BBC, the Mexican newspaper El Universal, Public Books, Words Without Borders and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others.

    His teaching for the Latin American Studies Program includes the introductory class (Latin America: Nation, Ethnicity and Social Conflict), and courses on Mexico, media theory, film and revolution and other issues in cultural studies. In Romance Languages and Literatures, his teaching focuses on 20th- and 21st-century Mexican literature, film and culture, as well as Latin American critical thought and literary theory. In addition, At the University College, he teaches classes on left-wing political theory, cultural policy, food studies and global cinema, for the Master-level programs in International Affairs and Liberal Arts. Prof. Sánchez Prado received the Distinguished Teaching Award from the School of Arts and Sciences in 2015. He has also received teaching awards from the Graduate School and the Undergraduate Council of Arts and Sciences.

    Prof. Sánchez Prado currently serves in the steering committee of UC Mexicanistas and in the Executive Council of the MLA. He is a member of the editorial board of various journals, including PMLA, Modernism/Modernity, Forma and Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana. He is the former President of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present.

    Prof. Sánchez Prado was appointed by the Librarian of Congress as the Chair of the Cultures of the South at the Kluge Center during the summer of 2021, conducting research towards his book on popular cosmopolitanism in Mexican cinema.

    Currently, Prof. Sánchez Prado serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Latin American Studies Program.

     

    Mexican Literature in Theory

    Mexican Literature in Theory

    Mexican Literature in Theory is the first book in any language to engage post-independence Mexican literature from the perspective of current debates in literary and cultural theory. It brings together scholars whose work is defined both by their innovations in the study of Mexican literature and by the theoretical sophistication of their scholarship.

    Mexican Literature in Theory provides the reader with two contributions. First, it is one of the most complete accounts of Mexican literature available, covering both canonical texts as well as the most important works in contemporary production. Second, each one of the essays is in itself an important contribution to the elucidation of specific texts. Scholars and students in fields such as Latin American studies, comparative literature and literary theory will find in this book compelling readings of literature from a theoretical perspective, methodological suggestions as to how to use current theory in the study of literature, and important debates and revisions of major theoretical works through the lens of Mexican literary works.

    Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market, and the Question of World Literature

    Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market, and the Question of World Literature

    Strategic Occidentalism examines the transformation, in both aesthetics and infrastructure, of Mexican fiction since the late 1970s. During this time a framework has emerged characterized by the corporatization of publishing, a frictional relationship between Mexican literature and global book markets, and the desire of Mexican writers to break from dominant models of national culture.

    Intermitencias americanistas. Estudios y ensayos escogidos (2004-2010)

    Intermitencias americanistas. Estudios y ensayos escogidos (2004-2010)

    El estudio del americanismo es una tarea crítica siempre pendiente, en cuyo desarrollo descansa una comprensión plena de genealogías intelectuales de México y América Latina. Este libro recoge una serie de ensayos académicos y literarios de Ignacio M. sánchez Prado sobre el tema, publicados entre 2004 y 2010, muchos de los cuales se hacen accesibles en México por primera vez en este libro.

    Naciones intelectuales: Las fundaciones de la modernidad literaria mexicana (1917-1959)

    Naciones intelectuales: Las fundaciones de la modernidad literaria mexicana (1917-1959)

    Naciones Intelectuales explores the processes and works that laid the foundations of a new literary modernity in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. It focuses on the period from the signing of the Constitution in 1917, to the death of Alfonso Reyes in 1959, and analyzes the four elements of Mexican cultural practices: the notion of literature, the figure of the intellectual, the creation of academic institutions, and the definition of national identity that emerged through the various debates held by leading figures of the period. The book analyzes different key moments, controversies, and cultural interventions, which ultimately led the diverse aesthetic spectrum created by the revolution into becoming a highly institutional system of literature.