On May 21, our center Maryam Parhizkar. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her research concerns race, aesthetics, colonialism and U.S. imperialism in the 20th and 21st-century Americas. 

This talk explored the Salvadoran Civil War as a part of this continuum by approaching the forensic sites materialized in two poems: the house in Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel” (1978) and the burial plot in William Archila’s “the Gravedigger’s Archaeology” (2015). Animated by desires for justice, these poems gather objects that not only gesture towards the war’s cruelty but the longer underpinnings of cruel modernity at the war’s core. By reading comparatively, I ask: what does thinking with such language offer us in we take stock of coloniality’s multi-layered injustices in the present?

On May 14, our center hosted Soledad Álvarez Velasco, a social anthropologist and human geographer whose work examines mobility, border control, and spatial transformations across the Americas. She is Assistant Professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago 

Transborder migration through the Americas has become one of the most urgent and politicized issues of our time. This talk explored what it means to inhabit transit: to repeatedly restart journeys, navigate uncertainty, and live in a constant state of (im)mobility while searching for safety and belonging.

On May 7, our center hosted Daniel Balderston (Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Languages at University of Pittsburgh and Director of the Borges Center), with discussion by Carlos Gustavo Halaburda.

In his lecture with the UChicago community, Balderston explored how manuscripts, notebooks, and lecture drafts by Jorge Luis Borges reveal the provisional and dialogic nature of literary creation, prompting us to rethink dominant narratives about authorship, pedagogy, and the relationship between private writing and public intellectual life.

On April 30, our center hosted Alejandro Bonvecchi (Professor at Torcuato Di Tella University and researcher at National Council for Scientific and Technical Research).

In his lecture with the UChicago community, Bonvecchi explored how variation in factional politics shapes the power of legislatures in authoritarian regimes, prompting us to rethink dominant narratives about executive control, institutional influence, and policymaking across dictatorships.

On April 23, our center hosted Elizabeth Pérez-Chiqués (Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of New Mexico and Assistant Professor at Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas).

In her lecture with the UChicago community, Pérez-Chiqués explored how practices such as the selling and inheritance of public sector positions reveal enduring forms of patrimonial governance in Mexico, prompting us to rethink dominant narratives of bureaucratic modernity, corruption, and institutional reform.

On April 20, our center hosted a conversation with Verónica Zubillaga (University of Illinois at Chicago) and Alejandro Velasco (New York University).

In conversation with the UChicago community, Zubillaga and Velasco examined Venezuela’s current political and social landscape through the lenses of urban violence, state power, and historical transformation, prompting us to rethink dominant narratives about crisis, governance, and everyday life in contemporary Venezuela.

On April 16, our center hosted Joshua Javier Guzmán (Associate Professor and Vice Chair in the Department of Gender Studies at University of California, Los Angeles).

In his lecture with the UChicago community, Guzmán explored how the photographic practices of Reynaldo Rivera and Mark Morrisroe illuminate intersecting queer social worlds across Los Angeles and New York, prompting us to rethink dominant narratives of visibility, intimacy, and urban transformation during the AIDS crisis.

On April 9, our center hosted Carlos Gustavo Halaburda (Assistant Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Chicago).

In his lecture with the UChicago community, Halaburda explored how Vaslav Nijinsky’s performances in Buenos Aires produced an ambiguous space of queer visibility—what he terms a “velvet siege”—prompting us to rethink dominant narratives of modernity, masculinity, and the spatial boundaries of queerness in Latin American cultural institutions.

On April 2, our center hosted Manuel Heitor (Professor at the University of Lisbon and former Minister of Science, Technology, and Higher Education of Portugal).

In his lecture with the UChicago community, Prof. Heitor explored how Europe’s evolving research and innovation agenda, grounded in efforts to integrate fragmented systems and expand investment, aims to position science at the center of geopolitical strategy, prompting us to rethink global knowledge production, talent circulation, and their future of international collaboration in science and technology with other countries, including Latin America.