Latin American Critical Cultural Studies Working Group

This working group will focus on Latin American Studies with a critical cultural approach. Working groups at Kellogg Institute focused on Latin America are mainly oriented towards social sciences. We propose to open the space for discussion of humanities that are equally fundamental to the debate on Latin American democracies and development. The Kellogg Institute currently has affiliated professors from the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures like Maria Rosa Olivera-Williams, Juan Vitulli, and Marisel Moreno, as well as from the Department of Art History like Tatiana Reinoza and Michael Schreffler. However, there has never been a working group particularly focused on the humanities area. We would like to fill this gap with our proposed working group on Latin America. Issues like migration, poverty and inequality, civil and human rights, modernization processes, collective memory, social movements and feminism, authoritarianism, and racial violence cannot be properly analyzed without inclusion of their expressions in the arts and literatures of the region. We expect to involve the Kellogg Institute in the cultural studies circuit as a relevant and conducive space for intellectual exchange.