David NicholsPostdoctoral Fellow in Spanish

David Nichols is a scholar of late 20th and early 21st century transnational mass incarceration as a cultural and social phenomena. He focuses on the late 20th and early 21st century in the Southern Cone (Argentina, Brazil, Chile), U.S. borderlands, and El Salvador. Through state-produced social media images, “high” literature, and prisoner-authored works, he investigates carceral spaces and their representations as laboratories for the nation and individual subjects, dumping grounds for people considered useless to markets and/or threatening to the state, and sites where the racialized categories of the human and the citizen are both defined and disrupted. His dissertation project, “Prisons and Mental Hospitals in the late 20th-century Southern Cone: Experimental Place, Text, and Hermeneutic,” addressed literary and visual representations of prisons and mental hospitals in in the works of Manuel Puig, Diamela Eltit, and the myriad responses to the Carandiru Massacre in Brazil. His work has appeared in Social Text and soon in Global South Journal. He is a longtime participant in the Tepotzlán Institute. 

Areas of interest: transnational carceral studies, surveillance, torture, post-Cold War Latin America, Latin American interpretations of the Global War on Terror, carceral geography, visual studies, late 20th-century Southern Cone literature.

Education: B.A. in Spanish and Portuguese, minor in Latino Studies in American Studies from the University of Kansas. Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies from Emory University.

Publications:

“Affect, Repetition, and Eroticized State Violence in El Salvador's Prisons.” Social Text 42, no. 4 (2024): 1-32.

“Measured Self-Destruction and the Migrant Carceral Landscape: Mergensana Amar’s Hunger Strike and Suicide at Northwest I.C.E. Processing Center.” Global South Journal. Forthcoming (October 2025).

Other projects:

Global Prison Studies Research Guide. Modeled roughly after Oxford Research Entries, this online interdisciplinary project features bibliographies and brief analyses of each region of the world’s prison systems. The entries explore global prison systems’ histories and functions in terms of the management of race and social class, as well as their relationships to colonial power.