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Alejandro Herrero-OlaizolaChair, Department of Spanish and PortuguesePaul & Phyllis Fireman Professor of Spanish
Biography
Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola completed his PhD in Spanish at the University of Southern California (1994). He arrived at Emory University in January 2024 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he taught Spanish and Latin American Studies and holds the title of Arthur F. Thurnau Professor Emeritus.
His research examines the dynamic interplay between market forces and the production and distribution of contemporary literature and culture across Spanish-speaking countries. His current book project, Global Ethno-Cinema: The Visual Culture of Displacement, examines Indigenous representation in contemporary Latin American cinema, focusing on the intersections of visual sovereignty, decoloniality, and transnational film circulation. The project explores how Indigenous narratives and experiences of displacement are represented, mediated, and circulated within the aesthetic and institutional frameworks of World Cinema.
He is the author of The Censorship Files: Latin American Writers and Franco’s Spain (2007) and Commodifying Violence in Literature and On Screen: The Colombian Condition (2022), which was recently revised and expanded as La condición colombiana: violencia y consumo cultural global (2025). He has also co-edited Teaching the Latin American Boom (2015) and Territories of Conflict: Traversing Colombia Through Cultural Studies (2017).
He recently completed a six-year term as Editor-in-Chief of Revista de Estudios Colombianos (2018–2024). His research has received recognition and funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and the Fulbright Foundation.
