Research

Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention

Faculty Research Conference Travel Grant
Grant Year
2017-2018

Research presentation: "Biopolitics and Pneumopolitics in the Hospital Project of Bartolomé de Las Casas."

I will present at the MLA a paper about the paradoxical connection between saving lives from overexploitation, war, hunger and sickness, and the continuity of the structural conditions that endanger those lives. This is a stufy of Father Bartolome de las Casas’s campaigns to reform the colonial system of exploitation of indigenous labor in Hispaniola in the beginning of the 16th century; and how they functioned as remedies not so much for the blood and pain of the Indians, but mostly for the political and economic health of the Empire and the colonial system that needed those indigenous lives in the agricultural fields and mines.