Laura Torres-RodríguezAssociate Professor of SpanishDIRECTOR OF UNDERGRADUATE STUDIES

Her first book, Orientaciones transpacíficas: la modernidad mexicana y el espectro de Asia [Transpacific Orientations: Mexican Modernity and the Specter of Asia] (2019), developed a transpacific approach to Mexican literary, artistic, and intellectual history that dislocated the transatlantic, Eurocentric, and postcolonial frameworks from which Latin American modernities had traditionally been studied and understood. In so doing, it posed questions of racialization, coloniality, and Mexican (post)colonial formation anew. It won the Best Book in the Humanities Award, Latin American Studies Association, Mexico Section (2020), and received an honorable mention for the 2019 Modern Language Association, Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize. Her articles and essays have been published in Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Latin American Literary Review, Public Books, Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, Revista Hispánica Moderna, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Ciberletras, Hablemos escritoras, and 80 grados.

 

She is currently working on a second book that explores the development of public discourse on autism in Puerto Rico's colonial context from the 1970s to the early 2000s. This period is marked by racist, "tough-on-crime" policies and increasing privatization of healthcare, which transformed caregiving practices, discourses, and infrastructures. The book's methodology combines personal storytelling, archival research, and analysis of literary, artistic, and philosophical works that center the non-speaking voice and non-verbal gestures and inscriptions in the construction of their (Caribbean) poetics.